Brave Search connector

The brave MCP adapter connects to the Brave Search API. Run privacy-focused web searches, fetch news and media results, look up local businesses, and generate AI summaries from search keys — useful for research, monitoring, and grounded agent responses.

Prerequisites

A Brave Search API subscription and API key (X-Subscription-Token)
project_contributor access in AgentRuntime

Connect in AgentRuntime

Subscribe to Brave Search API

Create a connection

Go to Connections and click New custom connection to create an API key connection with APIKey.

Add brave MCP instance

Go to MCP, click Add instance for brave, wire your connection on Instance config, set the profile active, and save.

Test web search

Run mcp_call → brave_web_search with a simple query to confirm the token works.

See Authentication for binding connections to MCP instances.

What you can build

News digests — brave_news_search with freshness=pd → LLM summarizes top stories → post to Slack or email.
Research with summary — brave_web_search with summary=true → pass summary key to brave_summarizer for inline citations.
Local lead gen — brave_local_search for businesses near a query → enrich with CRM connector.
Media monitoring — brave_image_search or brave_video_search for brand or product mentions.
Filtered web search — result_filter, goggles, and freshness for precise result sets.

Tools

Tool	Description
`brave_web_search`	General web search; set `summary=true` to obtain a key for the summarizer
`brave_summarizer`	AI summary from a prior web search summary key
`brave_news_search`	News articles (defaults to past day when freshness omitted)
`brave_local_search`	Local businesses and places with POI details
`brave_image_search`	Image search results
`brave_video_search`	Video search results

Example

Fetch today’s news on a topic:

{
  "id": "brave-news",
  "type": "mcp_call",
  "name": "Fetch news",
  "tool_name": "brave_news_search",
  "tool_args": {
    "query": "{{input.topic}}",
    "count": 10,
    "freshness": "pd",
    "extra_snippets": true
  },
  "timeout_s": 30
}

Configuration

Key	Required	Description
`APIKey`	Yes	Brave Search API subscription token
`APIBase`	No	Brave Search API base URL

Troubleshooting

Issue	Fix
`401` / invalid token	Verify subscription is active; key goes in `APIKey` as X-Subscription-Token
Summarizer fails	Run `brave_web_search` with `summary=true` first; pass the returned key to `brave_summarizer`
Empty local results	Query may be too broad; local search depends on Brave location data availability
Unexpected result types	Use `result_filter` on web search to limit to `web`, `news`, `videos`, etc.

Get started

Platform

Workflows

Guides

Integration setup

Connectors

AI & chat

API

Prerequisites

Connect in AgentRuntime

What you can build

Tools

Example

Configuration

Troubleshooting

​Prerequisites

​Connect in AgentRuntime

​What you can build

​Tools

​Example

​Configuration

​Troubleshooting

​Related

Prerequisites

Connect in AgentRuntime

What you can build

Tools

Example

Configuration

Troubleshooting

Related