Brave Search MCP server
Brave's official search server gives agents web, news, image, video, and local results via one API.
Brave Search MCP is the official server from Brave Software, built on the independent Brave Search API. It gives an agent a full search surface in one place: general web search with rich filtering, local business and place lookup, image, video, and news search, plus an AI summarizer and a context tool that returns pre-extracted, RAG-friendly web content. Because Brave runs its own index, results do not depend on a third-party search engine's terms, which matters for agents doing high-volume retrieval.
It runs over stdio via npx, defaulting to stdio transport per MCP convention, with an HTTP mode available behind a flag. Authentication is a single BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable. This is the maintained replacement for the older archived reference search server.
Quick install
Copy-paste configs are provided for all 8 supported clients. Pick your client below.
Add to ~/.claude.json
{
"mcpServers": {
"brave-search": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"@brave/brave-search-mcp-server",
"--transport",
"stdio"
],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "<BRAVE_API_KEY>"
}
}
}
}claude mcp add brave-search -- npx -y @brave/brave-search-mcp-server --transport stdioAvailable tools
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| brave_web_search | Runs a comprehensive web search with rich result types and advanced filtering. |
| brave_local_search | Searches local businesses and places with ratings, hours, and AI descriptions. |
| brave_video_search | Searches for videos with metadata and thumbnails. |
| brave_image_search | Searches for images and returns them automatically as base64. |
| brave_news_search | Searches current news articles with freshness controls and breaking-news indicators. |
| brave_summarizer | Generates an AI summary from web search results via Brave's summarization API. |
| brave_place_search | Searches points of interest in a geographic area via the Place Search API. |
| brave_llm_context | Retrieves pre-extracted web content optimized for LLM grounding and RAG pipelines. |
Required configuration
- BRAVE_API_KEYRequired
API key for the Brave Search API.
What you can do with it
Give an agent fresh web access
An agent answers questions about current events or recent releases by searching the live web instead of relying on stale training data.
Independent, high-volume retrieval
Teams that need to run many searches use Brave's own index and API rather than scraping a consumer search engine.
FAQ
- Is it free?
- The server is open source and free to run; the Brave Search API has a free tier and paid plans for higher volume.
- Does it support remote/OAuth?
- It defaults to local stdio and offers an HTTP transport behind a flag, but authentication is an API key rather than OAuth.