AI Search is now generally available
Cloudflare has made its AI Search service generally available, expanding multimodal support with native image embeddings, OCR for PDFs, and larger file handling while introducing billing starting November 1, 2026.
Cloudflare’s AI Search, which combines Workers AI, Vectorize, R2, and Browser Run into a managed index and retrieval pipeline, is now generally available after over a year in development. The service has been used internally to power search on Cloudflare’s blog and developer docs, while external developers have applied it to tasks like searching internal documentation and website content. General availability includes expanded multimodal support, native image embeddings, optical character recognition for PDFs, and support for files up to 10 MiB, up from 4 MiB previously.
AI Search now preserves visual details by embedding image pixels directly alongside captions, enabling searches that rely on visual characteristics such as texture, composition, or spatial relationships. The service uses Matryoshka Representation Learning to maintain efficient storage and fast search while supporting both caption-based and native image retrieval. Multimodal retrieval is available today with the Qwen3-VL-Embedding model, and text-only models can still process images by converting them to text via ToMarkdown.
The service now accepts text files and PDFs up to 10 MiB, with OCR available for scanned PDFs to extract text before chunking and embedding. OCR processing is billed under AI Search pricing as image processing ingestion tokens. Billing for AI Search begins on November 1, 2026, following preview pricing announced in August 2026, with a reminder email to be sent before activation.
Pricing is based on ingestion tokens, storage size, and query volume, with no instance hours or monthly minimums. The free tier includes 1,000 semantic queries, 1,000 full-text queries, and a pool of 5 million ingestion tokens per month. Future updates include support for video and audio processing, a refactored keyword search engine, and improved tools for enabling AI Search on websites running on Cloudflare.