Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Web Search API goes generally available

AWS has turned AgentCore's web search from a gateway-bound MCP tool into a first-class API. InvokeWebSearch draws on an Amazon-maintained web index and returns ranked results with text snippets and publication metadata. Developers do not provision crawlers, indexes or any other resources; they make one call and get results back.

The mechanics are designed for enterprise use. Calls are authenticated with standard IAM credentials, can be restricted to specific domains, and can stay inside a customer VPC so that queries and results never cross the public internet. Previously, teams that wanted grounded web results had to route through AgentCore Gateway as an MCP tool. Direct API access means ETL jobs, retrieval pipelines and hand-rolled agent loops can use the same index without adopting the full agent framework.

The launch fits a crowded week for agent infrastructure. The same AgentCore family gained Runtime V2 with snapshot cold starts and a Web Answer feature for cited, synthesized answers, while OpenAI shipped Control Room and NVIDIA pitched its agentic stack. Search grounding is a contested layer: OpenAI, Google and Perplexity each own consumer search surfaces, and third-party APIs such as Tavily and Exa serve agent builders. AWS's pitch is that its index sits inside the customer's existing security and billing perimeter.

Open questions remain. AWS has not published index freshness, coverage or per-query pricing in the sources here, and those numbers will decide whether the API displaces specialist search vendors in production agent stacks. Builders should benchmark result quality against incumbent APIs before migrating.