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Tavily MCP

by Tavily

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.

1,891·4 tools·Released FEB 2025·MIT
npx -y tavily-mcp@latest
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Tavily Search and Extract APIs as MCP tools, with both local stdio and hosted streamable transports. 1,891 GitHub stars and 14 commits on main in the last 30 days. Tavily is search-tuned for agent contexts: shorter, citation-friendly results compared with raw web search APIs.

Reviewed by M. Nouriel · MAY 2026

INSTALL THIS SERVER

Requires authenticationTAVILY_API_KEY environment variable. Token from https://app.tavily.com. Hosted streamable transport at https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp uses OAuth or API key in URL query string.
{ "mcpServers": { "tavily": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "tavily-mcp@latest" ], "env": { "TAVILY_API_KEY": "<your-tavily-key>" } } } }
PrereqRequires TAVILY_API_KEY from https://app.tavily.com. Hosted alternative: connect to https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp via streamable-http transport. NPM: `tavily-mcp`. Path: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS).
{ "mcpServers": { "tavily": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "tavily-mcp@latest" ], "env": { "TAVILY_API_KEY": "<your-tavily-key>" } } } }
{ "mcpServers": { "tavily": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "tavily-mcp@latest" ], "env": { "TAVILY_API_KEY": "<your-tavily-key>" } } } }
{ "mcpServers": { "tavily": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "tavily-mcp@latest" ], "env": { "TAVILY_API_KEY": "<your-tavily-key>" } } } }
{ "mcpServers": { "tavily": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "tavily-mcp@latest" ], "env": { "TAVILY_API_KEY": "<your-tavily-key>" } } } }

4 TOOLS AVAILABLE

tavily-search
Web search optimised for agent retrieval (citation-ready snippets)
Read
tavily-extract
Extract structured content from a URL
Read
tavily-crawl
Crawl a site and extract content
Read

OUR ASSESSMENT

Strengths
  • 1,891 GitHub stars and MIT licence.
  • 14 commits on main in the last 30 days.
  • Hosted streamable transport at https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp with OAuth flow.
  • Search results are tuned for LLM consumption: shorter, citation-friendly snippets.
  • Extract tool handles JS-rendered pages.
  • Crawl tool covers multi-page extraction in a single tool call.
Weaknesses
  • Tavily is a paid service; free tier has request caps.
  • Extract and crawl operations can stall on heavy pages; budget the agent tool-call timeout accordingly.
  • Hosted MCP requires a Tavily account and API key in the URL query string.
Security Notes

TAVILY_API_KEY embedded in URL query string for the hosted MCP carries the same risks as any URL-bearing token (logs, browser history). Prefer the Authorization header or stdio mode for production agents. Search and extract results contain third-party content; treat the stream as untrusted.

Best For

Agents that need search results pre-formatted for LLM citation; workflows where the agent extracts content from URLs as a follow-up to search; teams that want a hosted MCP option (mcp.tavily.com) with no local install.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

Language
javascript
Transport
stdiostreamable-http
Clients
Claude DesktopClaude CodeCursorVS CodeWindsurf
License
MIT
GitHub
npm
tavily-mcp
Last Release
tavily-mcp (npm latest)MAY 3, 2026
First Released
FEB 1, 2025

ADOPTION METRICS

// GitHub Stars
1,891

// Reading this1,891 stars on the tavily-ai/tavily-mcp repo. 14 commits on main in the last 30 days.

// Popularity Rank
#3
Globally · #3 in Search

// Reading thisThird-ranked in search; LLM-tuned snippet format and hosted streamable transport are the editorial pillars.

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.

01
Discovered
Manual submission
First indexed MAY 3, 2026
02
Cross-referenced
5 directories
PulseMCP, MCP.so, Glama, Smithery, Official MCP Registry
03
Verified against
Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor
Installed and tested across clients
04
Last re-checked
MAY 3, 2026
Weekly re-verification
// How other directories see it

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.

SourceTheir ratingTheir star countTheir downloadsLast synced
AutomationSwitch This page4.3editorial1,891MAY 3, 2026
PulseMCP— unratedunavailableunavailableMAY 3, 2026
MCP.so— unratedunavailableunavailableMAY 3, 2026
Glama— unratedunavailableunavailableMAY 3, 2026
Smithery— unratedunavailableunavailableMAY 3, 2026
Official MCP Registry— unratedunavailableunavailableMAY 3, 2026

// Counts are directory-reported; we don't adjust them. Discrepancies usually come from different snapshot times or star-caching.

// Get in touch

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