Cloudflare AI Search reaches GA, with multimodal retrieval and November billing
Cloudflare announced on October 1 that AI Search was generally available, combining Workers AI, Vectorize, R2 and Browser Run in a managed indexing and retrieval pipeline. Its announcement adds native image embeddings, OCR for PDFs and larger supported files. This is the date of the source announcement, not a new October 26 launch.
Native multimodal retrieval uses Qwen3-VL-Embedding to encode image pixels alongside caption-based understanding. A supported multimodal model can embed an image query directly; with a text-only model, AI Search converts the image to a caption through ToMarkdown. Those paths do not preserve the same visual information.
Text files and PDFs can now be up to 10 MiB, up from 4 MiB. Scanned PDFs require OCR to extract text before indexing. Cloudflare says OCR is available to every account and is charged as image-processing ingestion under the new pricing. Larger-file support is not unlimited file size.
Cloudflare says billing begins November 1, 2026. The announced monthly free allotment on all Workers plans includes one shared pool of five million ingestion tokens across supported file types, 10 GB of stored data, 1,000 semantic queries and 1,000 full-text queries. It is not a separate five-million-token allowance for images on top of text.
The announcement lists base ingestion at $0.75 per million tokens, image processing as an additional $0.50 per million tokens, storage at $2 per GB-month, semantic queries at $0.75 per thousand and full-text queries at $0.10 per thousand. Select Workers AI embedding and reranking models are included; third-party models are billed separately. Actual costs depend on content, storage and query use.
Teams should check their selected embedding model and estimate image-processing, storage and query volumes before relying on a free-tier budget. Cloudflare describes full video and audio ingestion and further keyword-search scaling as development work, not features already delivered by this announcement. No account or billing setting is changed by this report.