Cloudflare now sells web search from Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup through AI Gateway at partner list prices, billed from gateway credits with no markup. Teams already on the gateway skip a separate search vendor account, though their agents still have to issue each search call.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives75
- Confidence55
Google stops serving the Custom Search JSON API on January 1, 2027 and has already closed it to new customers. Teams using it for general web search now pick between rewriting for another provider and running a shim that copies the old contract.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives65
- Confidence45
Firefox's Exa-powered assistant appears only to users who switch it on, a wager that restraint sells where default-on assistants have not.
Perspective Coverage
5 publishers
- Builder
- Builder 28%
- Operator
- Operator 54%
- Investor
- Investor 18%
Reality
- Evidence60
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives55
- Confidence58
Keenable left stealth with $26 million and says AI labs already query its index during training and at runtime. The scarcity argument comes from the investor who led the round.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption22
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives70
- Confidence55
The September 16 partnership gives Firefox's beta assistant retrieval with sources, tab grouping and history previews, and each request only sees the tabs and history you grant it. Beta coverage is the US, Canada and France.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption28
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives58
- Confidence42
The Go proxy keeps SearXNG's JSON shape, so callers need no change. Starting the paid work before SearXNG answers costs one billed provider call on every cache miss, plus a five-minute breaker on any 4xx.
Reality
- Evidence48
- Adoption8
- Hype gap0
- Incentives70
- Confidence52
The Form D filed on September 14th dates the first sale to August 31st, 2026. The case for that much money rests on figures Firecrawl reports itself: 180,300 GitHub stars and an ARR claim on its Y Combinator profile.
Reality
- Evidence64
- Adoption58
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives68
- Confidence52
Google's Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers and stops working on January 1, 2027. One builder replaced it with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Web Search and paid a 40 percent premium to keep the tool under IAM.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption24
- Hype gap−10
- Incentives45
- Confidence52
The volume discount on its search API starts at 100 requests per second, which works out to roughly $3.2m a year. That tells you who the index is really for.
Reality
- Evidence34
- Adoption24
- Hype gap+26
- Incentives62
- Confidence41
Jeff Pinner arrives from Robinhood to run Exa's own index, GPU cluster and 323ms latency budget. Exa's stated targets imply roughly 97,000 requests in flight at once.
Reality
- Evidence42
- Adoption48
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives68
- Confidence45
Firefox's opt-in Smart Window gained Exa web search, tab grouping and visual history on August 18. The product is small; the positioning is the whole bet.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+32
- Incentives66
- Confidence55