Skip to main content
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

1

Subscribe to Brave Search API

Sign up at brave.com/search/api and copy your subscription token from the dashboard.
2

Create a connection

Go to Connections and click New custom connection to create an API key connection with APIKey.
3

Add brave MCP instance

Go to MCP, click Add instance for brave, wire your connection on Instance config, set the profile active, and save.
4

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

ToolDescription
brave_web_searchGeneral web search; set summary=true to obtain a key for the summarizer
brave_summarizerAI summary from a prior web search summary key
brave_news_searchNews articles (defaults to past day when freshness omitted)
brave_local_searchLocal businesses and places with POI details
brave_image_searchImage search results
brave_video_searchVideo 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

KeyRequiredDescription
APIKeyYesBrave Search API subscription token
APIBaseNoBrave Search API base URL

​
Troubleshooting

IssueFix
401 / invalid tokenVerify subscription is active; key goes in APIKey as X-Subscription-Token
Summarizer failsRun brave_web_search with summary=true first; pass the returned key to brave_summarizer
Empty local resultsQuery may be too broad; local search depends on Brave location data availability
Unexpected result typesUse result_filter on web search to limit to web, news, videos, etc.