BRAVESearch MCP

The Brave Search MCP Server gives your AI agent live access to the web. Whenever your agent needs current information — recent library releases, API documentation, error messages, or local business details — it searches Brave and returns real results instead of guessing.

It exposes six dedicated tools:

• Web search — full-featured search with filtering and spellcheck
• Local search — business and place discovery with ratings
• Video search — video results with metadata and thumbnails
• Image search — image discovery with automatic fetching
• News search — current articles with freshness controls
• AI summarizer — condense search results into a concise answer

This eliminates a whole class of hallucinations around version numbers, API changes, and recent events.

Setup

1. Grab an API key from brave.com/search/api — the free tier gives you 2,000 queries/month
2. Add the server to your MCP config and set the BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable
3. Install with npx -y @brave/brave-search-mcp-server, or use Docker via mcp/brave-search

The default transport is STDIO. Switch to HTTP with BRAVE_MCP_TRANSPORT=http if needed. You can also control which tools are exposed using BRAVE_MCP_ENABLED_TOOLS or BRAVE_MCP_DISABLED_TOOLS to limit the surface area.

Example prompts

"Search for the latest release notes for Next.js 15 and summarize breaking changes."

"Find local coffee shops near me with ratings above 4.5."

"Search for this error: 'ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:5432' and tell me the most common fixes."

The news tool is particularly useful for time-sensitive queries, and the summarizer saves you from reading through ten links to get a straight answer.