Alternatives to the Google Search API: your options before the 2027 shutdown Google will retire its Custom Search JSON API on January 1, 2027, and has already closed it to new signups, forcing existing developers to migrate to alternatives such as Agent Search under the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which is a rebrand of Vertex AI Search. The shutdown also ends free full-Web search across Programmable Search Engine, with new engines limited to 50 domains since January 20, 2026. Brave Search API offers a drop-in alternative with self-serve JSON endpoints and an LLM Context endpoint for agents. Alternatives to the Google Search API: your options before the 2027 shutdown On January 1, 2027 Google will be retiring its Custom Search JSON API, the long-standing way for developers to get Google search results as JSON. The API is already closed to new signups; after January 1, 2027 existing integrations will stop working as well. Google will point developers to one of three alternatives, including Agent Search under the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. But this is already a rebrand of the product Vertex AI Search that Google recommended only three months earlier. If you’re confused, you’re not alone. A dev following Google’s path today will encounter three names for one product: “Agent Search” in the docs, “Vertex AI Search” in the console, and “Discovery Engine” in the API and the URL slug is still generative-ai-app-builder, a fourth name . This highlights the instability of relying on a Big Tech company with the conflicting goals of owning both AI search and your AI development. For such critical infrastructure as AI and agent search, Google is putting many companies in a difficult and overly complex position. Whether you’re an app developer or looking to power your agents, if you need a drop-in alternative to the Google Search API, the Brave Search API /search/api/ covers the same use cases such as site search, AI grounding, and full-Web search with self-serve JSON endpoints and even cleaner data. It also includes a dedicated LLM Context endpoint https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/services/llm-context built for agents and chatbots—no Google and no Google scraping required. This article will discuss the Google shutdown and Brave as an alternative, and give a practical how-to guide for workflow migration from one to the other. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight, text-based data format that’s both human-readable and easily parsed by computers. It’s a widely used format for Web content. What’s happening to the Google Search API? For years, the Custom Search JSON API https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview was the closest thing to an official “give me search results as JSON” service. It grew out of Google’s Custom Search Engine 2006 and arrived as a JSON API around 2010, becoming a staple for indie developers, researchers, and small companies who needed Web or image results in a simple format. In a January 2026 blog post https://programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com/2026/01/updates-to-our-web-search-products.html , Google announced it would be transitioning away from the existing API product. Here’s the timeline: The API is already closed to new customers, so you can’t sign up for it today. Existing customers have until January 1, 2027 to move to something else, and after that the endpoint will stop serving results. If your product, internal tool, or research pipeline reads search results through this API, it will break unless you migrate to an alternative. But this is bigger than the JSON API. In the same announcement, Google began withdrawing free full-Web search across the Programmable Search Engine as a whole. As of January 20, 2026, every newly created engine must use the “Sites to search” setting, which is capped at 50 domains existing engines can keep the “Search the entire web” option only until January 1, 2027, the same deadline as the API . In other words, free open-Web search is going away across Google’s site-search products; the JSON API is just the most visible part of a wider pullback. What Google recommends Google’s announcement splits users of these products into three groups, each with a different suggested path. Knowing these paths will help you pick the right alternative to the Google Search API for your needs. Site-specific search If you only search your own website or a small set of sites, Google points you to its Programmable Search Element. This can work for a search box on a marketing site, but it’s built around a fixed list of domains up to 50 rather than the open Web. So the moment you need a result from a site you haven’t pre-registered, the Programmable Search option can’t return it. Enterprise AI and grounding For AI-powered conversational search and enterprise grounding, Google originally pointed users to Vertex AI Search—a product that Google has now renamed Agent Search and folded into the new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, only three months after recommending it. Tellingly, as of August 2026, Google’s own Custom Search migration page still lists the old “Vertex AI Search” name. Agent Search is a capable product, but it’s really an enterprise search and RAG retrieval service designed to run on Google Cloud with enterprise-style setup and pricing. For a small team that just wants search results as JSON, the Gemini agent platform will be overkill, and introduce more complexity than it solves. The numbers make this concrete. By default, Agent Search enforces a low search-rate quota, and Google’s own documentation https://cloud.google.com/generative-ai-app-builder/quotas tells you not to request a quota increase—to go higher, you must switch to its Configurable subscription, which starts at a minimum of 1,000 QPM and 50 GB of storage: roughly $6,000 per month before any add-ons. It also bills for the data you index $5.00 per GB-month on the General model , a cost that grows with your corpus. Google Agent Search | Brave Search API | | |---|---|---| Default throughput | Low default rate quota; can’t be raised without a subscription | 50 requests/sec Search plan | Entry cost | $1.50 / 1,000 General model, your own corpus or a Configurable subscription from ~$6,000 per month for throughput | $5 / 1,000 queries open Web , pay-as-you-go, with $5 free monthly credits | Your own data | $5 / GB-month General ; storage and embedding add-ons Configurable | No per-GB storage fee since you’re querying Brave’s index | Setup | Google Cloud project, enterprise onboarding | Self-serve API key | For a team that just wants Web results or grounding as JSON, that’s a steep floor to clear. To be fair on unit price, Google can be cheaper per query: if you only need to search your own indexed data, the General model within Agent Search costs $1.50 per 1,000 queries, below Brave’s Search plan $5 / 1,000 queries . But that rate buys corpus search over a fixed set of sites, not the open Web—and it still carries the storage fees, the rate-quota cap, and the Cloud setup overhead. Brave has the edge for that corpus use case, serving open-Web results from an independent index not a repackaged Google feed , far higher self-serve throughput, and no infrastructure to stand up. Full-Web search You can no longer sign up for a Google API that returns open-Web results as JSON a ranked list of links you can page through the way the old Custom Search API did. Agent Search doesn’t fill the gap either—it searches only the sites you specify and index, not Google’s public Web index. That’s a fundamentally different product from a Web search API. Meanwhile, for a raw results feed, Google routes you to a form to register interest in a future solution, with pricing and details to come. Google does sell self-serve, live open-Web products—but they’re grounding SKUs, not a results feed. Grounding Queries exceeding predefined limits are billed at $14 per 1,000 grounding queries on Gemini 3, and on Gemini 3 Google bills for each search the model decides to run—so one user question can trigger several charges. On Gemini 2.5 and earlier the rate is $35 per 1,000 prompts, and Web Grounding for enterprise is $45 per 1,000 prompts. Both return a synthesized answer with citations rather than raw results. Brave’s closest equivalent, the Answers plan, is $4 per 1,000 searches plus $5 per million input/output tokens; if you’d rather run your own model, LLM Context gives you the grounding data directly. That last gap is the important one. The thing most people valued about the old Google Search API that is, that you could send a query and get open-Web results as JSON no longer has a simple, ready-to-use replacement from Google. Alternatives to the Google Search API: where the Brave Search API fits The Brave Search API /search/api/ runs on Brave’s own Web index of 40+ billion webpages, and returns results as structured JSON over a REST endpoint. It’s also self-serve: You can sign up, get your API key, and start building today. It maps cleanly onto all three of Google’s use cases, and each of Brave’s plans includes $5 in free monthly credits—and with four self-serve plans available Search, Answers, Autosuggest, and Spellcheck , that’s up to $20 per month in total free credits. Add to that self-serve usage limits, and you can test at low or no cost. Site-specific search Brave supports custom ranking through a feature called Goggles https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/resources/goggles , which lets you boost or restrict specific domains at query time. That means you can confine results to just the sites you care about much like a programmable search engine without being locked to a fixed list baked into a separate product. You get site-focused results and the open Web from the same API. Enterprise AI and grounding This is where Brave really stands out, thanks to a dedicated endpoint called LLM Context https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/services/llm-context , purpose-built for agents and chatbots. Instead of returning a plain list of links, the LLM Context endpoint does the hard part for you: A single call returns pre-extracted Web content ranked for relevance, with text chunks, tables, code blocks, and structured data. And each of these will have per-source provenance, so your model can reason over it directly. There’s no separate step for scraping or fetching. LLM Context can help with the same workflows where an enterprise might otherwise turn to Google’s Agent Search and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The main differences are that Brave’s solution is available through a simple REST API you can wire up in minutes, and it’s purpose-built for AI-powered conversational search or grounding rather than being part of a larger AI development platform . If you’d prefer to have Brave produce the finished answer rather than run your own model , there’s a separate Answers plan https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/services/answers : it returns a researched, grounded answer along with the Web sources that back it, priced at $4 per 1,000 Web searches plus $5 per million input/output tokens. And, as with Brave’s other plans, Answers includes $5 in free credits every single month. Answers is the closest analog to Google’s generative, conversational answers that is, for easy access to machine intelligence with minimal setup while LLM Context https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/services/llm-context remains the better fit when you want to keep control of the model layer and just need high-quality grounding data to feed it. Full-Web search This is the biggest difference. Where Google now routes full-Web users to a form, Brave offers full-Web search from its own, completely independent index of the Web—it’s self-serve and available right now. You get open-Web results as JSON the exact pattern that made the old Google Search API a favorite of developers without a waitlist. How to migrate: grounding an agent with LLM Context Migrating is straightforward. First, get an API key from the Brave Search API dashboard https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/ . Then send your query to the LLM Context endpoint and read the JSON payload. It’s the same “query in, JSON out” flow you already know, except it returns ready-to-use grounding content instead of just links. Here’s a simple request with cURL: curl "https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/llm/context?q=who+won+the+f1+race+this+weekend" --compressed \ -H "Accept: application/json" \ -H "X-Subscription-Token: