Brave already sells search to machines through the Brave Search API, at $5 per 1,000 requests with an account and an API key. Its public GitHub shows it building the next step: search that an AI agent can buy one query at a time, with no account and no key, paid in stablecoins at the moment of the request.
The project is bx402, an open-source (MPL-2.0) “micropayment proxy for Brave Search API over x402 and MPP”. The repo dates from May. This week it gained a substantial new piece: Brave’s own payment facilitator.
How it works
The README describes the flow:
- A request with no payment receives an HTTP
402 Payment Requiredresponse that advertises two payment rails: x402 (USDC on Base) and MPP (pathUSD on Tempo). - The client retries with a signed payment header. “The signed payment act[s] as the credential.” No signup, no API key.
- On x402, the proxy verifies the payment first (a dry run that moves no money), runs the search, and only then settles. In the README’s words, “a failed search is never charged.” On MPP, verifying the signed transaction settles it before the search runs.
Pricing is Brave’s existing rate card, charged per request: 5000 base units, which is $0.005, or $5 per 1,000, for web search, LLM Context, news, images, videos and three local endpoints (place search, POIs and descriptions). Three things are left out on purpose. The Answers API bills per token, which one fixed 402 price can’t express. Autosuggest and Spellcheck cost less than the fee for settling a single payment. The Summarizer is deprecated.
Agents can also discover it themselves. The service serves /openapi.json and an /llms.txt “buyer’s guide” written “for an agent that wants to buy a search”. An optional flag lists the endpoints in x402 catalogues. The README says only “a deployment meant to be listed, such as production” should turn that on.
What changed this week
The README says production points at the Coinbase-hosted x402 facilitator. The commit history for 27 and 28 October adds a facilitator module: it signs transactions “with a key held in AWS KMS”, “settle[s] exact payments on the configured networks”, gives each settlement its own nonce under concurrent load, and serves verify-and-settle over HTTP. Put plainly, Brave appears to be building the piece that settles payments itself, rather than relying only on a third party. I’d treat that as intent shown in code, not a launched product. Brave has not blogged about it, and I could not find a public production hostname in the documentation.
Why search people should care
Brave has been telling this story for months. In April it said nearly 700,000 OpenClaw users had signed up for the API, and called the trend “machine-first search”. Meanwhile the Chinese engines are pricing the same product openly: DeepSeek at $0.75 per 1,000, Tencent Yuanbao from ¥14 and Baidu at ¥36. Brave isn’t the cheapest, but it is removing the account step, which competitors still require. For an autonomous agent, “can I buy this query right now?” may matter more than the price per thousand.
If agents choose a search backend per query on price, freshness and whether they can pay, then which index you are in starts to fragment. Being well represented in Google tells you nothing about whether Brave’s independent index, which is what bx402 sells, has crawled and understood your pages. I said the same when Chrome added Brave Search: check your Brave visibility directly, by searching your key pages in Brave Search, and look for Brave’s crawler in your logs.
The evidence standard here is a public repo with a clear README and dated commits, from Brave’s own GitHub organisation. That is enough to say what Brave is building. It is not enough to say when, or whether, it ships to everyone. We will update when there is an announcement.