Brave Search MCP
Official Brave Search MCP covering web, local, video, image, news, and AI summary. 965 GitHub stars and 31 commits on main in the last 30 days. Privacy-respecting search index distinct from Google.
“Official Brave Search MCP covering web, local, video, image, news, and AI summary. 965 GitHub stars and 31 commits on main in the last 30 days. Privacy-respecting search index distinct from Google; useful when agents need an independent corpus.”
INSTALL THIS SERVER
{
"mcpServers": {
"brave-search": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"@brave/brave-search-mcp-server"
],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "<your-brave-api-key>"
}
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"brave-search": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"@brave/brave-search-mcp-server"
],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "<your-brave-api-key>"
}
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"brave-search": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"@brave/brave-search-mcp-server"
],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "<your-brave-api-key>"
}
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"brave-search": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"@brave/brave-search-mcp-server"
],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "<your-brave-api-key>"
}
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"brave-search": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"@brave/brave-search-mcp-server"
],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "<your-brave-api-key>"
}
}
}
}
6 TOOLS AVAILABLE
OUR ASSESSMENT
- Official Brave maintenance.
- 965 GitHub stars and MIT licence.
- 31 commits on main in the last 30 days.
- Six tool categories (web, local, video, image, news, summarizer) cover most search use cases.
- Privacy-first index gives results distinct from Google or Bing.
- Goggles (custom re-ranking definitions) supported on web search.
- Pro plan unlocks extra_snippets and AI summarization.
- Brave Search API has a free tier with rate limits; Pro features are paid.
- AI summarizer requires a Pro plan for the summary parameter.
- Local search index is most useful for North American business listings; global coverage varies.
BRAVE_API_KEY scopes to a single Brave Search Subscription. Rotate keys via the Brave dashboard. Search results return third-party URLs; treat the result stream as untrusted in the host LLM context.
Agents that need a privacy-respecting search index distinct from Google or Bing; workflows that benefit from Brave Goggles re-ranking; teams running production agents who want six search modalities (web, local, video, image, news, summarizer) from a single MCP.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
ADOPTION METRICS
// Reading this965 stars on the brave/brave-search-mcp-server repo. 31 commits on main in the last 30 days.
// Reading thisSecond-ranked in search; official Brave vendor signal.
SOURCES & VERIFICATION
We don't take any single directory's word for it. Before scoring, we cross-reference 5 public MCP sources, install the server ourselves against the clients we cover, and record when we last re-verified.
The same server, 5 different lenses. We reconcile these signals into our editorial score, which is why our number sometimes diverges from a directory-aggregate star count.
| Source | Their rating | Their star count | Their downloads | Last synced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AutomationSwitch This page | 4.4editorial | 965 | — | MAY 3, 2026 |
| PulseMCP | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 3, 2026 |
| MCP.so | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 3, 2026 |
| Glama | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 3, 2026 |
| Smithery | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 3, 2026 |
| Official MCP Registry | — unrated | unavailable | unavailable | MAY 3, 2026 |
// Counts are directory-reported; we don't adjust them. Discrepancies usually come from different snapshot times or star-caching.
OTHER SEARCH MCP SERVERS
Exa Search MCP
Neural search across the open web, companies, news, people (LinkedIn), and academic papers, plus a deep-research mode that runs multi-step query plans. 4,371 GitHub stars and 83 commits on main in the last 30 days.
Tavily MCP
Tavily Search and Extract APIs as MCP tools, with both local stdio and hosted streamable transports at https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp. 1,891 GitHub stars and 14 commits on main in the last 30 days.
DuckDuckGo Search MCP
Community-built DuckDuckGo Search MCP server with web search, content fetching, and intelligent text extraction. Built-in rate limiting protects against DuckDuckGo blocking. SafeSearch and region configuration via env vars.
DISCUSS YOUR
MCP REQUIREMENTS.
Evaluating a server, scoping an internal deployment, or working out whether MCP is the right fit at all. Start the conversation and we will point you at the right piece of the ecosystem.