Brave Search MCP Server

The Brave Search MCP Server gives Claude and other AI agents access to real-time web search through Brave’s independent search index. Unlike Google or Bing, Brave operates its own crawler — no repackaged results from the incumbents. That matters if you’re building privacy-conscious agents or need search results without tracking or personalization artifacts.

The MCP server exposes six search tools covering web, local, news, images, video, and an AI summarizer. It’s one of the few MCP servers that goes beyond web search into local business lookups, which makes it useful for location-aware agents.

Installation

You’ll need a Brave Search API key. Get one at api-dashboard.search.brave.com — see pricing section below before signing up.

Prerequisites: Node.js 18+

Claude Desktop configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave-search": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@brave/brave-search-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Config file location:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

There are two available packages:

• @brave/brave-search-mcp-server — Brave’s own first-party server (recommended, more current)
• @modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search — the MCP reference implementation (older)

Use Brave’s own package. It stays in sync with their API changes and added the image/video/news tools.

Available Tools

Tool	What It Does
brave_web_search	General web search — returns URLs, titles, snippets, age
brave_local_search	Businesses, restaurants, POIs near a location with ratings
brave_news_search	News articles with recency filtering
brave_image_search	Image results with metadata
brave_video_search	Video results (YouTube and others)
brave_summarizer	AI-synthesized summary of search results

The local search tool is particularly useful for agents that need to handle location-aware requests — “find a coffee shop near X” or “what’s the address of Y business” — without requiring a separate Maps API.

Pricing

Important change as of February 2026: Brave removed their free API tier.

New structure:

• Monthly credit: $5 in free credits (~1,000 searches/month) with attribution requirement
• Base AI: $5 per 1,000 requests, 20 queries/second
• Pro AI: $9 per 1,000 requests, 50 queries/second

For light agent use (daily search tasks, research workflows), $5/month in credits covers it. For high-volume use (continuous agents, batch research pipelines), you’re looking at $5-50/month in API costs.

The attribution requirement for the monthly credit means you must credit Brave Search in your project’s website or about page. For commercial products, check the exact terms before relying on this.

Limitations

• Not free. The free tier was removed in February 2026. Every deployment now requires a valid API key and billing setup.
• Rate limits: Credit tier is limited to 1 query/second — too slow for real-time agents with concurrent requests. Base AI allows 20 queries/second.
• No structured data. Returns search result summaries, not scraped page content. For full-page content, you’d need to follow up with a fetch tool.
• No reverse image search. The image tool returns image results, not lookup by image.
• Summarizer quality varies. The brave_summarizer tool can be inconsistent on complex or niche topics.

Example Usage

User: What's the current status of OpenClaw's foundation governance?

Claude: [uses brave_web_search to find recent news]
        [uses brave_news_search filtered to last 7 days]
        Result: summarizes 3 recent sources with citations

Compared to Claude’s training cutoff, the Brave Search tools give agents access to information from the last few days rather than the last year or two.

Alternatives

If you just need web browsing (not search), the Filesystem MCP Server combined with Playwright handles page content directly. For GitHub-specific content, the GitHub MCP Server is more efficient than searching for it.

Other search MCP options include Exa, Tavily, and SerpAPI — all require API keys, all paid. Brave’s advantage is an independent index and no data resale.

Our Take

The Brave Search MCP is the right choice if you need real-time web search in your AI workflows and Brave’s privacy-first index matters to you. The February 2026 pricing change makes the free-tier math less appealing for hobbyist use, but at $0.005/query it’s still inexpensive for agents with moderate usage.

Best for: Research agents, news monitoring, location-aware workflows, anything that needs current information Claude doesn’t have.

Skip if: You only need static knowledge retrieval (no search needed), or you want a completely free search option (none exist at scale anymore).

Rating: 8.5/10