Brave is turning its search engine into infrastructure for AI agents. Agents working online need to search the web and pay for the services they use. Brave aims to provide both for AI labs, enterprises and independent developers. Brave runs one of the few full web indexes open to agents and was the first search tool built into OpenClaw. AI helped drive a fivefold jump in its search ad revenue in 2025. The Search API is getting x402 next so agents can pay Brave directly for each search. Brave would then handle both the search and the payment for each query.