Brave Search MCP Server

Features

• Web Search: General queries, news, articles, with pagination and freshness controls
• Local Search: Find businesses, restaurants, and services with detailed information
• Flexible Filtering: Control result types, safety levels, and content freshness
• Smart Fallbacks: Local search automatically falls back to web when no results are found

Tools

• brave_web_search
  • Execute web searches with pagination and filtering
  • Inputs:

    • query

      (string): Search terms

    • count

      (number, optional): Results per page (max 20)

    • offset

      (number, optional): Pagination offset (max 9)
• brave_local_search
  • Search for local businesses and services
  • Inputs:

    • query

      (string): Local search terms

    • count

      (number, optional): Number of results (max 20)
  • Automatically falls back to web search if no local results found

Configuration

Getting an API Key

1. Sign up for a Brave Search API account
2. Choose a plan (Free tier available with 2,000 queries/month)
3. Generate your API key from the developer dashboard

Usage with Claude Desktop

claude_desktop_config.json

Docker

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave-search": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-e",
        "BRAVE_API_KEY",
        "mcp/brave-search"
      ],
      "env": {
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

NPX

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave-search": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search"
      ],
      "env": {
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

Build

docker build -t mcp/brave-search:latest -f src/brave-search/Dockerfile .

License