Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Web Search API Is Generally Available: InvokeWebSearch Costs $7 per 1,000 Queries, Allows Up to 10 Requests per Second per Account per Region by Default, Runs in Six Regions but Not AWS GovCloud (US-West), and Requires You to Retain and Display Source Citations; the Notice and Guide Give No Data on Index Size, Freshness or Result Quality

On November 10, 2026, AWS announced general availability of a Web Search API on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The notice says it lets you search the web with a single API call. Web Search on AgentCore was already available as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool through AgentCore Gateway. The new InvokeWebSearch API is for code that calls the service directly: applications, custom agent loops and data pipelines, with no resources to create first. This report uses the AWS notice and the AgentCore Developer Guide page on web search. It did not test the API, and no measurement of result quality, freshness or latency appears in either source.

The API returns a ranked list of results from what the notice calls "the Amazon-operated web index behind Web Search on AgentCore". Each result includes a text extract from the page and, when they are available, the page title, URL and publication time. The words "when available" matter: a result can arrive without a title or a date, so code that depends on those fields needs a fallback. You can filter each request by domain and by publication time. The notice gives two uses: finding recent product announcements, and checking a claim against trusted domains. The guide says the same, and adds that you can also look up sources for a research question.

Calling it is routine for AWS users. You use the AWS SDKs or the AWS Command Line Interface, and you authorize calls with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). The guide says the API authorizes callers with IAM only, while a gateway can also authorize callers with a JSON Web Token (JWT). You can call the API from your virtual private cloud through AWS PrivateLink, and you can log requests as AWS CloudTrail data events. These are the controls a security team will ask about first. The sources do not say what the service logs or keeps about the query text, and this report does not assume it.

The price and the quota are stated. Queries are billed at $7 per 1,000 queries, which is $0.007 per query. The notice says this is the same rate as Web Search through AgentCore Gateway, and that there are no gateway charges for the API. By default each account can send up to 10 InvokeWebSearch requests per second in each Region, and you can request an increase through AWS Support. The sources do not say whether a request that returns no results is billed. A system that fans out many searches in parallel should do the arithmetic: if all 1,000 searches are billed at the published rate, they cost $7, and the default quota limits how many requests per second one account can send in one Region unless AWS Support raises it. The sources do not say how long a burst takes to complete.

The service is available in six Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Ireland). The guide says it is not available in AWS GovCloud (US-West). There, you must use the Web Search Tool connector, which is also available in that Region. A team that must keep traffic inside a given Region should check this list first, because the sources do not describe where the index is hosted or where queries are processed.

The guide compares the API with the Gateway connector in a list of differences. The API is called on the AgentCore data plane endpoint; agents call the connector as an MCP tool through a gateway. The API takes the search text in a field named searchQuery, the MCP tool in a field named query. If you do not set maxResults, the API returns up to 25 results and the MCP tool returns up to 10. Publication time is bounded by publishedAfter and publishedBefore in the API, and by from and to in the MCP tool. Both treat both bounds as inclusive. There is one detail that can cause off-by-one-day errors. When a date has no time, the MCP tool's "to" date includes that whole day, but the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI send a publishedBefore date as midnight Coordinated Universal Time at the start of that day. With the API, a publishedBefore filter set to a bare date therefore cuts off at the start of that day, so articles published later that day fall outside it. This is a reading of the guide's rule, not an example the guide gives. Also, the API takes a domain filter on each request, while the connector can apply target-level domain lists to every request without the calling agent seeing them.

The acceptable use terms deserve a second look. The guide says the terms for the Web Search Tool also apply to results from the InvokeWebSearch API, including the requirement to retain and display the source citations and links that come with each result. For a product that shows search results to users, or one that feeds them into a model and then shows the answer, this is a design requirement and not a footnote. The guide points to a separate Acceptable use page for the full terms, which was not captured for this report.

What the sources do not establish is as important as what they do. They do not say how large or fresh the index is, which languages it covers, how results are ranked, or how the API compares with other search services on quality or cost. The notice calls the API generally available in six Regions. The developer guide sets the default quota: up to 10 requests per second for each account in each Region. A team that wants to use it for agents should test result quality on its own queries, set the date filters with the UTC midnight rule in mind, plan for the citation requirement and estimate cost from the $7 per 1,000 queries rate.