Brave Search MCP Server

What brave/brave-search-mcp-server MCP server does

The brave/brave-search-mcp-server MCP server connects MCP clients to Brave Search API operations. It provides separate tools for general web search, local businesses, videos, images, news, places, AI-oriented web context, and summaries generated from search results.

Web search accepts a required query and optional controls for country, search and interface language, result count, pagination, safe search, freshness, spell checking, result types, custom re-ranking definitions, measurement units, additional snippets, and summary-key generation. News search adds current-article retrieval and freshness defaults suited to recent coverage. Image and video tools return their respective search metadata, while place search can find points of interest using a query, coordinates, a location string, and an optional radius.

How it works

The server supports two MCP transports. STDIO is the default in the current version. HTTP can be selected by setting BRAVE_MCP_TRANSPORT to http or by launching the runtime with --transport http.

A typical summarization flow uses two calls: first run web search with summary generation enabled, then pass the returned summary key to the summarizer tool. The summarizer can optionally return entity information and inline source references.

The LLM-context tool retrieves pre-extracted web content for agent grounding and retrieval workflows. Its controls include URL and snippet limits, approximate token budgets, per-URL limits, and context-threshold modes.

Tools and capabilities

The brave/brave-search-mcp-server MCP server exposes these documented operations:

• brave_web_search for general web results and advanced filtering.
• brave_local_search for businesses and places, including ratings, hours, and descriptions.
• brave_video_search and brave_image_search for media discovery and metadata.
• brave_news_search for news articles, freshness controls, and breaking-news indicators.
• brave_place_search for structured points-of-interest data such as addresses, hours, contact details, ratings, photos, categories, and time zones.
• brave_llm_context for web content prepared for AI agents and RAG pipelines.
• brave_summarizer for summaries based on a summary key returned by web search.

Local search automatically includes web and location result types. Full local-search functionality requires a Pro plan; otherwise, the tool falls back to web search. Additional snippets are also documented as a Pro-plan feature for web and news search.

Limitations and notes

Queries are limited to 400 characters and 50 words. Several tools cap pagination offsets at 9, and each search type has its own result-count limits. Place searches can run globally when no radius is supplied, while geographic searches can use coordinates or a location string.

Version 2 no longer returns base64-encoded image data from image search. Image responses instead contain an object shaped more closely to the Brave Search API response, including image metadata and URLs.