Cloudflare AI Search Adds Discover Mode and MCP Access
The service now crawls sites without a sitemap, exposes an unauthenticated /mcp endpoint for agents, and stays free for the duration of the beta.
Illustration: in a vast server hall under cool blue light, glowing fiber strands run above the rack rows and converge into a single bright node.
Cloudflare has extended AI Search with a Discover mode that no longer requires a sitemap and with open /mcp and /search endpoints, so AI agents can search custom data without anyone building a retrieval pipeline first.
At a glance
- AI Search handles crawling, ingestion, embedding and retrieval as a ready-made service over custom data.
- The new Discover mode picks up pages even when no sitemap exists.
- The /mcp and /search paths let agents connect with no authentication and no deployment of their own.
- Free during the beta; at general availability, answer generation and query rewriting are billed by model usage.
- Single source for this report: InfoQ, August 30, 2026 — no second independent newsroom is available.
Cloudflare has widened AI Search so that agents and applications can query a company's own data without a team first assembling a retrieval stack. InfoQ reported the update on August 30, 2026.
What the service takes over
AI Search runs the whole chain: crawling, ingestion, embedding and retrieval. Both structured and unstructured data can be indexed. Cloudflare frames the aim as giving agents a search engine of their own, so they can find the data behind better answers for themselves and for the people using them.
The new pieces
Crawling used to depend on a sitemap. A Discover mode now picks up pages when none exists. A single public endpoint also allows searching across several instances and sites at once, with no authentication step.
Agents can attach through the /mcp and /search paths, which need neither authentication nor a deployment of their own. A plugin covers the open-source CMS EmDash. An index is created from the wrangler command line, with a namespace, a source URL and a parse type.
Where it sits on the platform
The service draws on Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize and R2, and applications hook in through Workers. According to the report it already runs on Cloudflare's own developer documentation as well as for Astro, Vite, Hono and Replicate.
Cost
Nothing is charged during the beta. At general availability, embedding and re-ranking are meant to stay free with the default or selected Workers AI models. Answer generation and query rewriting are then billed according to model usage.
What we could not verify
This account rests on a single newsroom. There is no date for general availability, no price list, no stated beta limits and no measured figures on retrieval quality. The source also does not say which media types the multimodal search covers.
FAQ
What is Cloudflare AI Search?
A ready-made search and retrieval service over custom data. It handles crawling, ingestion, embedding and retrieval so agents and applications can search without a retrieval pipeline of their own.
Is Cloudflare AI Search free?
It is free during the beta. At general availability, embedding and re-ranking are meant to stay free with the default or selected Workers AI models, while answer generation and query rewriting are billed by model usage. The source gives no price list.
Does Cloudflare AI Search need a sitemap?
No longer. The new Discover mode finds pages even when a site publishes no sitemap.
