trawlia-mcp

Trawlia as an MCP server: web search and page extraction, as two tools any MCP client can call.

Get a free key at trawlia.co/signup - 100 credits a month, no card.

Claude Code

Terminal

claude mcp add trawlia --env TRAWLIA_API_KEY=twl_... -- npx -y trawlia-mcp

Claude Desktop, Cursor, and anything else reading a JSON config

config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "trawlia": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "trawlia-mcp"],
      "env": { "TRAWLIA_API_KEY": "twl_..." }
    }
  }
}

The tools

`trawlia_search`

Ranked, deduplicated results from the live web.

Argument	Default	Notes
`query`	required	Natural language, not keywords.
`search_depth`	`basic`	`basic` is 1 credit and returns snippets. `advanced` is 2 and returns full page text.
`topic`	`general`	`news` reaches news indexes and returns publication dates.
`max_results`	5	Up to 20. These go into your context, so fewer is usually better.
`include_domains` / `exclude_domains`	-	Host filters. Subdomains are included.
`time_range`	-	`day`, `week`, `month`, `year`.

`trawlia_extract`

Fetches URLs you already have and returns their readable content, with navigation, cookie banners and newsletter modals removed. 1 credit per 5 URLs, so pass the whole list at once.

What the model sees

Results come back as readable text rather than raw JSON, and carry two things a plain response would lose:

When a page could not be read, the result says so and why, instead of presenting a snippet as though it were the article.
A coverage line when a source was unavailable, so the model can weigh a thin result set properly rather than reporting it as a confident nothing.

Errors are readable sentences that say whether retrying is worth it. Running out of credits says so and says not to retry; a rate limit says how long to wait.

Costs

Operation	Credits
Basic search	1
Advanced search	2
Extraction	1 per 5 URLs

Charged before the work and refunded on hard failure. Full price list at trawlia.co/pricing.

Not available

Search and extraction, and nothing else. There is no crawler and no long-running job to poll. If your agent needs to walk a whole site, this is the wrong server for it.

Checking it works

bash

TRAWLIA_API_KEY=twl_... node smoke.mjs

Spends a few credits against the real API and prints what a client sees: the tool list, a rendered search, a rejected parameter, and an extraction. Not in CI, because it costs money and depends on the live web.

Environment

Variable	Required	Notes
`TRAWLIA_API_KEY`	yes	A `search`-scoped key is enough and is what you should deploy.
`TRAWLIA_BASE_URL`	no	Defaults to `https://api.trawlia.co`. For pointing at a local server.