Brave Search MCP Server (Web Search via API)

Brave Search Server: Live Web Lookups

Claude Desktop ships without web access by default. The Brave Search MCP server adds it via Brave's independent search index — a privacy-respecting alternative to Google or Bing.

Config

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

Getting an API key

1. Visit api.search.brave.com and create an account.
2. Subscribe to the Free tier (2,000 queries/month, no credit card required) or a paid plan if you need more.
3. Copy the API key from the dashboard. It starts with BSA_.
4. Paste it into the env field. The key authenticates against Brave's API, not your local browser session.

Tools the server exposes

The server registers two MCP tools: brave_web_search for general queries and brave_local_search for location-scoped lookups (restaurants, businesses, etc.). The model decides which to call based on the user's question.

Quota tracking

The free tier resets monthly; if you exceed it the server returns a 429 error and the model will see a tool call failure. Monitor usage on the Brave API dashboard, or check our rate-limit calculator to estimate how many queries 2,000/month means in practice.

Why not just use a fetch server?

You could approximate web search with the fetch server pointing at Brave or DuckDuckGo's HTML endpoint, but parsing the HTML response is brittle. The dedicated MCP server returns clean JSON results and handles pagination and rate-limit headers for you.