Stack Score

Editorial pickMCP server

Brave Search MCP

Privacy-focused web search for Claude.

Try Brave Search MCP✓ Free trial available

Best for

Developers and Claude users who want privacy-respecting web search piped directly into their assistant via MCP.

At a glance

Pricing: freemium
Setup time: 15 minutes
Learning curve: medium
Last verified: 5/27/2026

What we love

✓Independent search index, not reliant on Google or Bing
✓Free tier of 2,000 queries/month for development
✓Simple to run locally with one env variable
✓Returns clean, parseable results

Where it falls short

−Index smaller than Google for very long-tail queries
−Requires Brave API key — not fully self-hosted
−No built-in scraping — just snippets and URLs

Install & connect

Copy-paste ready

Install

shell

npx -y mcp-remote https://brave.run.tools

Config — Claude Desktop

json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://brave.run.tools"]
    }
  }
}

Config — Claude Code

shell

claude mcp add --transport http brave https://brave.run.tools

Pricing

✓ Pricing verified Jun 14, 2026

1 tier

Open source

MIT license

✓Self-hosted
✓Free forever
✓Brave API key required

Why we picked it

The default web-search MCP when Claude needs current info and you don't want to pay OpenAI for search.
— MoreAI.tools editor

Overview

Official Brave Search MCP — web + news + image search using Brave's privacy-respecting API. 2000 free queries/month.

Key features

●Web search results returned via Brave Search API
●Privacy-first — no user tracking or personalization
●News, web, and image result endpoints
●MCP server exposes search as a Claude tool
●Configurable result count and freshness filters
●Returns full URLs and snippets for LLM grounding
●Local cache option for repeat queries

Exposed tools

The MCP-tool names this server exposes. Your agent can invoke any of these when this server is connected.

brave_web_search
Web searches using the Brave Search API.
brave_news_search
Search for news articles using Brave's News Search API.
brave_image_search
Image search using the Brave Search API.
brave_video_search
Video search using Brave's Video Search API.
brave_local_search
Local Search API with enriched location results.
brave_llm_context
Pre-extracted relevance-ranked web content optimized for LLMs.
brave_place_search
Brave Place Search API.
brave_summarizer
AI-generated summaries of web search results (Pro AI tier required).

Best use cases

Research agents

Give Claude live web access without sending queries through Google or Bing.

News monitoring

Pull fresh news results into automated workflows or summaries.

Privacy-conscious lookups

Search the web without tracking — relevant for legal, medical, or competitive research.

Integrations

Claude Desktop

Claude Code

Cline

any MCP client

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