The New HTTP QUERY Method

If you've ever built a search endpoint, you've hit this wall. Your query has filters, sort orders, a nested set of facets, maybe a geo bounding box. It doesn't fit in a URL, and cramming it into query string params is ugly and fragile. So you reach for POST /search , send the whole thing as a JSON body, and quietly accept that you've just lied about what the request does. It's not creating anything. It's a read. But POST is the only tool that lets you attach a body without fighting the platform. That gap finally got filled. In June 2026 the IETF published RFC 10008 , which defines the HTTP QUERY method: a new verb built for exactly this case. The two bad options Every read that needs structured input has been stuck choosing between GET and POST, and both are wrong in their own way. GET is the semantically correct choice. It's safe (the client isn't asking to change anything), it's idempotent (retrying it is fine), and it's cacheable. The problem is the body. RFC 9110 is explicit that content in a GET request has no defined semantics , and sending one may cause some implementations to reject the request. So your query has to live in the URI, where you run into unknown length limits across proxies and servers, encoding overhead, and the query landing in access logs and browser history. POST solves the body problem and creates a new one. It carries any payload you want, but it's neither safe nor idempotent by definition. Intermediaries won't cache it, clients won't retry it automatically after a dropped connection, and anything inspecting traffic has to assume the request might have side effects. You get the body, you lose everything that made the request honest. QUERY is the missing third option: a method that carries a body and keeps the semantics of a read. What QUERY actually is The spec, authored by Julian Reschke, James Snell , and Mike Bishop, describes it in one sentence: A QUERY requests that the request target process the enclosed content in a safe and idempo