What is Ceramic?
Web-search API for AI agents and LLMs that runs its own index and a single /search endpoint rather than reselling Google or Bing, from ex-Google search architect Anna Patterson.
Our verdict
Ceramic.ai is a web-search API built for LLMs and agents, founded by Anna Patterson, who was a VP of Engineering at Google, architected its TeraGoogle index, and later founded Gradient Ventures. Co-founder and chief scientist Tom Costello previously built the search engine Cuil. That search pedigree is the substance behind the pitch. The generally available product is a single /search endpoint at api.ceramic.ai that returns JSON results (title, url, and a text-snippet description, with snippet length tunable) shaped for machine consumption rather than human browsing. It ships Python and TypeScript SDKs, an MCP server, and integrations for LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, and Anthropic tool use, and is positioned as retrieving from its own index rather than wrapping Google or Bing.
The company is the same one that launched out of stealth in March 2025 as LLM training infrastructure, raising a $12M seed led by NEA with IBM, Samsung Next, Earthshot Ventures, and Alumni Ventures; it has since led with the search API. At NVIDIA GTC 2026 it announced Supervised Generation, a verification and citation layer powered by NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano, but that is waitlist-only and there is no generally available answer endpoint today, so /search returning snippets is the surface you can actually build on. Headline claims (100x cheaper, roughly 50ms latency, a 40B+ page index) are vendor-reported and we have not seen them independently benchmarked.
Worth evaluating if you want a low-cost, index-independent search API for agent loops and are comfortable with a young product whose search-specific track record and customer base are not yet public. For deeper retrieval with full page contents, or broader proven coverage, the more established peers are the safer default. Note the name collision: this is ceramic.ai, not the unrelated web3 Ceramic Network at ceramic.network.
Categories:
AI search APIs are the infrastructure layer that gives large language models access to current web information. Unlike traditional search engines, these APIs return semantically relevant, structured results optimized for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI agent workflows. They are used by AI products that need to answer questions about the real world beyond their training data.
