Brave Search MCP Server

The official Brave Search MCP gives Claude web, news, image, video and local search from Brave's own index. Setup, all 8 tools, and the free monthly credit.

Pricing

freemium

GitHub stars

1,458

Last commit

2026-09-17

Page updated

2026-09-22

Server is free and open source. The Brave Search API includes $5 of free credit each month; after that it's $5 per 1,000 searches.

Official vs community Brave Search MCP

What you can ask it

• “Search "best CRM for agencies" in the US and the UK, 20 results each, and tell me which domains rank in both”
• “Find news from the past week about [competitor] and summarize anything that affects our positioning”
• “Search images for "minimalist SaaS pricing page" and list the 10 brands whose designs come up most”
• “Find coffee shops within 2 km of central Lisbon with ratings and hours, as a table for a local outreach list”
• “Use LLM context to pull the key claims from the top 5 results for "what is vibe marketing" and tell me what they all miss”

Features

• `brave_web_search` with country, language, freshness and up to 20 results per page
• `brave_news_search` defaulting to the last 24 hours, for trend and PR monitoring
• `brave_image_search` and `brave_video_search` for creative and competitor research
• `brave_local_search` and `brave_place_search` for local business data (ratings, hours, addresses)
• `brave_llm_context`: pre-extracted page text with token limits, built for grounding answers
• `brave_summarizer`: AI summary of a web search's results
• Tool allow/deny lists (`BRAVE_MCP_ENABLED_TOOLS`, `BRAVE_MCP_DISABLED_TOOLS`) and stdio or HTTP transport

How to set up the Brave Search MCP Server

Works with: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code

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

claude mcp add brave-search -e BRAVE_API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE -- npx -y @brave/brave-search-mcp-server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave-search": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-e",
        "BRAVE_API_KEY",
        "docker.io/mcp/brave-search"
      ],
      "env": {
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

Alternatives

FAQ

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