OpenClaw ships with no built-in web index -- it relies entirely on a configured search provider to answer any question about current events or live web content. Which provider you wire in determines whether the agent gets full page text or just a title and snippet.
Brave Search API is OpenClaw's official default and the most widely deployed option, with Brave reporting nearly 700,000 OpenClaw users enrolled on its API as of this writing.
Tavily and Exa are built specifically for AI agents rather than adapted from a general search product, returning structured, LLM-ready answers and content extraction in the same call.
Firecrawl is the only provider on this list that bundles a query-based search endpoint and a full-page scrape endpoint in one API, which matters if you want both discovery and full content without a second tool.
SerpAPI is the strongest choice if you need real, multi-engine SERP data -- Google, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, and dozens more -- rather than an AI-summarized answer.
Perplexity's Sonar API trades a free tier for synthesized, cited answers, which suits research-style queries better than simple lookup.
SearXNG is the only fully free, self-hosted, no-API-key option, at the cost of running and maintaining the metasearch instance yourself.
A search provider finds and ranks URLs; it does not always hand your agent the full, clean text of the pages it found -- see the workflow note in the use-cases section for how teams close that gap.
Introduction: What OpenClaw Search Providers Actually Do
OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent that runs locally and executes tasks through chat interfaces like Signal, Telegram, and Discord, using an external LLM (Claude, GPT, or DeepSeek models) as its reasoning engine. It ships without its own web index, so any task that needs current information -- "what's the latest version of X," "find me three vendors that do Y" -- depends on a search provider configured through an API key and environment variable, most commonly , , or an equivalent for whichever service is wired in.
A "search provider" in this context does one of two jobs, and the two are easy to conflate. Some providers return classic search results -- titles, URLs, and short snippets, the same shape a human would see on a results page. Others are built specifically for AI agents and return a synthesized answer, structured JSON, or extracted page content directly, skipping the snippet step entirely. This guide ranks the seven providers most commonly configured with OpenClaw in 2026, verified against each vendor's own current pricing and documentation, then walks through a side-by-side spec table and a decision guide organized by what you actually need the provider to return.
Take a Quick Look
Most search providers return snippets, not full page text -- if your OpenClaw agent needs the complete, clean content of the pages a search turns up, Nstdata Crawl fetches and renders any URL into ready-to-use Markdown or structured data.
Rank reflects overall fit for an OpenClaw deployment across four factors: how directly the provider slots into OpenClaw's existing search-provider configuration pattern, free-tier usability for testing before committing spend, whether the response is agent-ready (structured or synthesized) versus requiring extra parsing, and pricing transparency. Providers that only return titles and snippets are evaluated as search providers, not penalized for lacking full-page extraction -- that's a separate capability covered in the use-cases section below.
1. Brave Search API: Best Overall, Official Default
Brave Search API is OpenClaw's official default provider and, per Brave's own account of the integration, nearly 700,000 OpenClaw users have enrolled to use it -- Brave notes it was the first provider integrated into OpenClaw and remains one of the only independent, at-scale search indexes available via API, since Google restricts API access and Microsoft has been phasing out its Bing Search API. Per Brave's pricing page, the Search plan runs $5 per 1,000 requests with $5 in monthly free credit (roughly 1,000 free queries) and supports up to 50 queries per second; a separate Answers plan adds token-based charges for synthesized responses. Brave operates its own independent web index rather than reselling Google or Bing results, with zero data retention on request.
Best for: teams that want the path of least resistance -- it's the provider OpenClaw ships expecting, with the largest existing user base to draw troubleshooting help from.
2. Tavily: Best for AI-Optimized Structured Answers
Tavily is built specifically as, in its own words, "the real-time search engine for AI agents and RAG workflows," returning structured, LLM-ready answers with content extraction rather than a bare snippet list. Per Tavily's pricing page, its free Researcher tier includes 1,000 API credits per month with no credit card required; a pay-as-you-go tier bills $0.008 per credit, and a Project tier provides 4,000 credits per month at an adjustable rate. Because Tavily was designed around agent consumption from the start, its responses tend to need less post-processing before an LLM can act on them compared to a raw search-results provider.
Best for: agents that need a direct, structured answer to feed back into the LLM without an extra parsing step.
3. Firecrawl: Best for Combined Search and Full-Page Extraction
Firecrawl is the only provider in this list that exposes both a query-based search endpoint and a URL-based scrape endpoint under one API, which matters for OpenClaw setups that want discovery and full content without wiring in two separate tools. Per Firecrawl's pricing page, the free plan includes 1,000 credits per month (search costs 2-10 credits per request depending on result count, scrape costs 1 credit per page), and paid plans range from a $16/month Hobby tier (5,000 pages) up through a $599/month Scale tier (1,000,000 credits); Firecrawl's scrape endpoint also handles JavaScript-rendered pages, which a snippet-only search API cannot.
Best for: setups that want one vendor and one API key covering both "find the pages" and "get the full clean content of those pages."
4. Exa: Best for Neural/Semantic Search
Exa runs neural (semantic/meaning-based) search alongside traditional keyword search, which surfaces conceptually relevant pages that don't necessarily share the query's exact wording -- useful for research-style OpenClaw tasks where the right answer might use different terminology than the question. Per Exa's pricing page, new accounts get $20 in signup credit plus $10 in credits per month; its Search API costs $7 per 1,000 requests for up to 10 results (with additional results billed separately), and a separate Contents API charges $1 per 1,000 pages for full-page content and token-efficient highlights.
Best for: research and discovery tasks where meaning matters more than exact keyword overlap.
5. SerpAPI: Best for Real, Multi-Engine SERP Data
SerpAPI returns actual search-engine results pages rather than an AI-synthesized summary, covering more than 70 engines and platforms including Google (in multiple variants), Bing, Amazon, YouTube, and DuckDuckGo. Per SerpAPI's pricing page, the free plan includes 250 searches per month at 50 requests/hour throughput; paid plans start at $25/month for 1,000 searches and scale up to a $275/month Big Data tier covering 30,000 searches, with every tier including SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification.
Best for: OpenClaw tasks that specifically need to see what a real search engine returns -- rankings, ads, shopping results -- rather than a pre-summarized answer.
6. Perplexity Sonar API: Best for Synthesized, Cited Answers
Perplexity's Sonar API returns a synthesized answer with tracked citations rather than a list of links to sort through, which fits research-style queries better than a simple lookup. Per Perplexity's own pricing documentation, there is no free tier: the base Sonar model bills $1 per million input/output tokens plus a $5-12 per-1,000-request fee that scales with how much search context the query pulls in, and a Sonar Deep Research tier adds separate per-million-token charges for citation and reasoning tokens plus $5 per 1,000 search queries for multi-step research runs.
Best for: OpenClaw workflows that need a directly citable, synthesized answer and can absorb per-request cost without a free tier to fall back on.
7. SearXNG: Best Free, Self-Hosted Option
SearXNG is an open-source, AGPL-3.0-licensed metasearch engine that aggregates results from other search engines -- Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others -- without maintaining its own index, and it requires no API key at all. Because it's self-hosted (via Docker, per its own setup documentation), there's no per-query bill and no third-party logging of your OpenClaw agent's queries, but you're responsible for deploying, updating, and keeping the instance reachable rather than calling a vendor's managed endpoint.
Best for: teams that want zero per-query cost and full control over query privacy, and are comfortable running one more self-hosted service.
Side-by-Side Specifications
Provider
API key required
Result format
Free tier
JS-rendered page support
Brave Search API
Yes
Search results, LLM-optimized snippets
$5/mo credit (~1,000 queries)
No (search only, not a scraper)
Tavily
Yes
Structured answer + extracted content
1,000 credits/mo
Via its extraction feature
Firecrawl
Yes
Search results and/or full-page scrape
1,000 credits/mo
Yes (scrape endpoint)
Exa
Yes
Neural search results + content
$20 signup + $10/mo
Via its Contents API
SerpAPI
Yes
Structured multi-engine SERP JSON
250 searches/mo
No (returns SERP data, not page content)
Perplexity Sonar API
Yes
Synthesized answer with citations
None
No (synthesizes from indexed content)
SearXNG
No
Aggregated search results
Free (self-hosted)
No
Selection Guide
You want the path OpenClaw expects out of the box: choose Brave Search API.
You want agent-ready structured answers with minimal parsing: choose Tavily.
You want one API for both search and full-page scraping: choose Firecrawl.
Your queries are conceptual and keyword search keeps missing the point: choose Exa.
You need to see real SERP data across multiple engines, not a summary: choose SerpAPI.
You need citation-backed synthesized answers and cost isn't the deciding factor: choose Perplexity's Sonar API.
You want zero per-query cost and full control over query privacy: choose SearXNG.
Use Cases
Most OpenClaw deployments use their search provider for a narrow set of jobs: answering "what's the latest on X" questions, checking a fact or price before acting on it, finding a handful of candidate URLs before a deeper task, or grounding an answer with citations the user can verify. Which provider fits depends on which of those dominates -- citation-heavy research work favors Perplexity or Tavily, while a quick fact-check favors Brave or SearXNG.
There's a gap several of these providers share: a query-based search API's job is to find and rank URLs, not necessarily to hand back the full, clean text of every page it found. Brave, SerpAPI, SearXNG, and Perplexity all return snippets, structured metadata, or a synthesized summary rather than the complete page content -- which is enough for a quick lookup but not always enough for a task that needs to reason over a full article, product page, or documentation site. Nstdata Crawl is built for that second step: given a URL your search provider surfaced, it returns clean Markdown, cleaned HTML, or structured data (full output schema in the Crawl API docs) with JavaScript rendering and Nstdata's own proxy network handled automatically, so an OpenClaw agent gets the complete page rather than a two-line snippet. It is not a query-based search provider itself -- it takes a URL, not a search query -- so it's a companion to whichever provider from this list does the finding, not a replacement for one.
Full-page extraction for URLs your search provider already found -- Markdown, cleaned HTML, raw page data, links, screenshots, or PDF from a single URL, so an agent isn't limited to whatever snippet length the search API returned.
JavaScript rendering for pages a snippet-only search API can't see past -- renders dynamic content in a real browser before extracting it, which matters for sites that hide article text behind client-side rendering.
Site-level crawling with scope controls -- when a task needs more than one page from the same site (a full changelog, a multi-page product spec), Crawl can walk the site directly with configurable depth, page limits, and include/exclude rules instead of one search query per page.
Pricing runs pay-as-you-go from $1.20 per 1,000 successfully crawled requests on the free plan, dropping to $1.00 on the $79/month Starter tier, $0.80 on the $249/month Growth tier, and $0.60 on the $699/month Scale tier as included monthly credits increase -- billed only on pages that were actually fetched, so failed requests aren't charged. Teams routing this kind of ingestion traffic across multiple OpenClaw agents or projects can also read how Nstdata's Proxy Manager supports AI-agent and RAG data pipelines at scale.
Take a Quick Look
Once your OpenClaw agent's search provider hands back a list of URLs, Nstdata Crawl turns each one into clean, LLM-ready content in a single API call.
Brave Search API leads this comparison because it's the path OpenClaw already expects, with by far the largest deployed user base to lean on when something breaks. Tavily and Exa cover the two ends of "built for agents, not adapted for them" -- structured answers versus meaning-based discovery -- while Firecrawl is the one provider that closes the search-plus-extraction gap in a single API. SerpAPI and Perplexity serve narrower, well-defined needs (real SERP data, citation-backed synthesis), and SearXNG remains the only genuinely free, no-API-key path for teams willing to self-host. None of that changes the separate fact that most of these providers hand back snippets rather than full page text -- closing that gap, when a task needs it, is a second tool's job, not a reason to rank one search provider over another.
Q: What is OpenClaw and why does it need a search provider?
OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent that runs locally and carries out tasks through chat interfaces, but it ships with no built-in web index, so any task requiring current information depends on a search provider configured through an API key.
Q: Which search provider does OpenClaw use by default?
Brave Search API is OpenClaw's official default and the first provider it integrated, with Brave reporting close to 700,000 enrolled OpenClaw users on its API.
Q: Is there a free way to add web search to OpenClaw?
Yes -- SearXNG is free and self-hosted with no API key or per-query cost, and Brave, Tavily, Firecrawl, and Exa all offer free monthly credit or query allowances large enough for testing and light use.
Q: Can I use more than one search provider with OpenClaw at the same time?
OpenClaw's configuration is built around setting one active provider via its API key environment variable, so most setups pick one primary provider; running multiple providers for different tasks generally means building custom routing logic rather than relying on built-in switching.
Q: What's the difference between a search provider and a page-extraction tool for OpenClaw?
A search provider takes a query and returns ranked URLs, snippets, or a synthesized answer; a page-extraction tool like Nstdata Crawl or Firecrawl's scrape endpoint takes a specific URL and returns the full, clean content of that page -- the two solve different steps of the same "find, then read" workflow.
Q: How do I get full page content instead of just snippets from OpenClaw's search results?
Pair a search provider that returns URLs (Brave, SerpAPI, SearXNG) with a URL-based extraction tool that fetches and cleans the full page -- Firecrawl and Tavily bundle some of this natively, while Nstdata Crawl and Firecrawl's scrape endpoint are dedicated options for the extraction step specifically.
Lena Zhou
Sep. 2nd 2026
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