Brave Search MCP
The Brave Search MCP Server is Brave's official MCP server for its Search API. It gives AI assistants real-time web search plus several specialised searches: local businesses and places, images, videos, news, an AI summariser, and an LLM-context tool that returns pre-extracted web content designed for grounding answers and RAG pipelines.
It suits anyone who wants an assistant to answer with current information rather than training data, especially when you prefer an independent search index over Google or Bing. Web search supports fine-grained parameters such as country, language, result count, freshness filters, safe search and Goggles for custom re-ranking. Version 2 changed defaults: the server now uses stdio by default (set `BRAVE_MCP_TRANSPORT=http` for HTTP), and image search no longer returns base64 image data, which saves a lot of context.
Getting started: sign up for a Brave Search API account, choose a plan and create an API key, then add the server to your client, for example with Docker (`docker run -i --rm -e BRAVE_API_KEY docker.io/mcp/brave-search`) or via npx, passing the key as `BRAVE_API_KEY`.
Features
Why choose it
Trade-offs
Maintenance check
- Last commit
- 2026-10-26
- Commits, last 90 days
- 27
- Releases, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest release
- v2.1.4 (2026-09-17)
- Open issues
- 45
- Recent issues with at least one comment
- 3/6
Oldest week on the left; the latest four weeks are orange. Source: GitHub commit activity.
Status rule: archived on GitHub = Archived; last commit within 90 days = Active; 91 to 365 days = Slowing; older = Stale. All figures come from the GitHub API on the date shown.
Most discussed open issues
- #162 429 response5 comments · 2025-11-11
- #36 api client ignores HTTPS_PROXY/HTTP_PROXY and NO_PROXY env settings5 comments · 2025-08-07
- #254 Search returns undocumented JSONL instead of the API response schema shown in docs4 comments · 2026-03-05
- #80 FAILED TO CONNECT/MCP ERROR 32000/HELP PLEASE3 comments · 2025-09-24
- #176 Add Authorization header support for API key in HTTP transport mode2 comments · 2025-11-25
Issue titles are quoted from GitHub. Open the link to check whether a problem still applies to the version you use.
Compatibility
Quick start
Use cases
Alternatives
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first!