Brave Search MCP Server

✓ verified

Web and local search via Brave's privacy-focused search API.

Don't have ToolPiper? We'll take you to the download.

Open repository →

Publisher

Anthropic Reference (archived)

License

MIT

Transport

Local subprocess

Tools

2

What this server does

An independently-built search index, not a Bing or Google reseller. The free tier covers 2,000 queries per month at sign-up, and Brave does not log query content tied to user identity. For a chat agent that asks the web a lot of small questions, this is one of the cheaper credentials you can get. Two tools cover the surface: `brave_web_search` runs a Brave web search with `count` (max 20 results) and `offset` (max 9) for pagination; `brave_local_search` searches businesses, restaurants, and services, falling back to web search automatically when no local results match, so you can call it speculatively without worrying about empty results. Sign up at brave.com/search/api and generate a key from the developer dashboard at api-dashboard.search.brave.com/app/keys. Where it fits: research, fact-checking, finding documentation pages, looking up product reviews. For deeper workflows, pair Brave Search with the Fetch server so the assistant can pull the actual content of the URLs Brave returns. The Anthropic reference here is archived. Brave now ships an official MCP server at brave/brave-search-mcp-server with the same capabilities plus image search and news search. New installations should switch to the official one; the archived version remains functional for existing deployments.

Tools included

  • brave_web_search

    Search the web via Brave Search.

  • brave_local_search

    Search local businesses and points of interest.

The authoritative list comes from the server's tools/list at runtime. This catalog entry may lag the upstream until the next ToolPiper release.

Install in ToolPiper

ToolPiper handles the JSON configuration. Click Install, fill in any required tokens, and the server is ready in your chat.

Don't have ToolPiper? We'll take you to the download.

Install in another client

Install in another MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Continue, Cline)

Add this to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave-search": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Example prompts

  • "Search for the latest TypeScript 5.5 release notes and return the first five results."

  • "Find Italian restaurants near Capitol Hill, Seattle."

  • "Look up benchmarks comparing Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Edge."

  • "What is the current rate limit on the Anthropic API per the docs?"

Security notes

The API key is per-account and rate-limited; treat it as a credential because it gates billing. Brave does not use session tokens or OAuth, so revoking is one click at api-dashboard.search.brave.com/app/keys. Each tool call costs one query against your monthly quota. The Anthropic reference is archived; the official replacement at brave/brave-search-mcp-server is maintained by Brave themselves and adds image and news search. Switch for new installs.

Related tools