Default MCP Servers - Search露
Web search and content retrieval. Remote services (Tavily, Exa, Firecrawl, Jina AI, SerpAPI) expect a vendor API key via ${VAR} placeholders in the headers; the community stdio entry (Brave Search) needs BRAVE_API_KEY in the env section. All five remote services have a free tier sufficient for tutorial-scale use.
Entries (6)露
Click any card to expand the full spec inline - transport (Streamable HTTP / STDIO), authentication shape (OAuth 2.1 / API key / Bearer / none), required environment variables, vendor URL or stdio command, and the upstream docs link.
AI-optimised web search and answer engine for grounding LLMs with up-to-date facts and sources. Requires TAVILY_API_KEY.
Vendor Tavily 路 T1 vendor
Auth API key
Vendor - Tavily (vendor-official)
Transport - Streamable HTTP
URL - https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp
Auth - API key
Stability - GA 路 Tier - Tier 1
Required env - TAVILY_API_KEY
Tags - global
Tools - 4 tools published by the vendor (per its MCP docs); no static per-tool levels - the live set varies by plan / scopes / release, so confirm it and the recomputed levels on the Inspector:
Tools (4) - tavily-search 路 tavily-extract 路 tavily-crawl 路 tavily-map
tavily-searchtavily-extracttavily-crawltavily-map
Description
AI-optimised web search and answer engine for grounding LLMs with up-to-date facts and sources. Requires TAVILY_API_KEY.
Neural web search by Exa - semantic ranking, source-aware retrieval, and high-quality result snippets. Requires EXA_API_KEY (x-api-key header).
Vendor Exa 路 T1 vendor
Auth API key
Vendor - Exa (vendor-official)
Transport - Streamable HTTP
URL - https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp
Auth - API key
Stability - GA 路 Tier - Tier 1
Required env - EXA_API_KEY
Tags - global
Tools - 3 tools published by the vendor (per its MCP docs); no static per-tool levels - the live set varies by plan / scopes / release, so confirm it and the recomputed levels on the Inspector. 3 active (+ several deprecated).
Tools (3) - web_search_exa 路 web_fetch_exa 路 web_search_advanced_exa
web_search_exaweb_fetch_exaweb_search_advanced_exa
Description
Neural web search by Exa - semantic ranking, source-aware retrieval, and high-quality result snippets. Requires EXA_API_KEY (x-api-key header).
Web scraping, crawling, and structured data extraction with anti-bot handling. Bearer-authenticated with FIRECRAWL_API_KEY.
Vendor Firecrawl 路 T1 vendor
Auth Bearer
Vendor - Firecrawl (vendor-official)
Transport - Streamable HTTP
URL - https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp
Auth - Bearer
Stability - GA 路 Tier - Tier 1
Required env - FIRECRAWL_API_KEY
Tags - global
Tools - 14 tools published by the vendor (per its MCP docs); no static per-tool levels - the live set varies by plan / scopes / release, so confirm it and the recomputed levels on the Inspector. core set; optional tools vary by version.
Tools (6 of 14) - firecrawl_scrape 路 firecrawl_search 路 firecrawl_map 路 firecrawl_crawl 路 firecrawl_check_crawl_status 路 firecrawl_extract
firecrawl_scrapefirecrawl_searchfirecrawl_mapfirecrawl_crawlfirecrawl_check_crawl_statusfirecrawl_extract
Description
Web scraping, crawling, and structured data extraction with anti-bot handling. Bearer-authenticated with FIRECRAWL_API_KEY.
Jina AI Reader (URL-to-clean-markdown) and search APIs for LLM-grounded retrieval. Bearer-authenticated with JINA_API_KEY.
Vendor Jina AI 路 T2 vendor
Auth Bearer
Vendor - Jina AI (vendor-official)
Transport - Streamable HTTP
URL - https://mcp.jina.ai/v1
Auth - Bearer
Stability - GA 路 Tier - Tier 2
Required env - JINA_API_KEY
Tags - global
Tools - 20 tools published by the vendor (per its MCP docs); no static per-tool levels - the live set varies by plan / scopes / release, so confirm it and the recomputed levels on the Inspector:
Tools (10 of 20) - read_url 路 capture_screenshot_url 路 search_web 路 search_arxiv 路 search_images 路 parallel_read_url 路 classify_text 路 extract_pdf 路 expand_query 路 sort_by_relevance
read_urlcapture_screenshot_urlsearch_websearch_arxivsearch_imagesparallel_read_urlclassify_textextract_pdfexpand_querysort_by_relevance
Description
Jina AI Reader (URL-to-clean-markdown) and search APIs for LLM-grounded retrieval. Bearer-authenticated with JINA_API_KEY.
Real-time Google, Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Naver and other SERP scraping with structured JSON. API key embedded in URL path (SERPAPI_API_KEY).
Vendor SerpAPI 路 T2 vendor
Auth API key
Vendor - SerpAPI (vendor-official)
Transport - Streamable HTTP
URL - https://mcp.serpapi.com/${SERPAPI_API_KEY}/mcp
Auth - API key
Stability - GA 路 Tier - Tier 2
Required env - SERPAPI_API_KEY
Tags - global
Tools - 1 tool published by the vendor (per its MCP docs); no static per-tool levels - the live set varies by plan / scopes / release, so confirm it and the recomputed levels on the Inspector:
Tools (1) - search
search
Description
Real-time Google, Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Naver and other SERP scraping with structured JSON. API key embedded in URL path (SERPAPI_API_KEY).
[macOS] Brave Search API - web, local, news, image, and video search. Outbound calls only to api.search.brave.com (no SSRF surface). The activated form is pre-filled to run: npx -y...
Vendor Brave 路 T1 vendor
Auth STDIO
Vendor - Brave (vendor-official)
Transport - STDIO
Command - npx
Args - -y @brave/brave-search-mcp-server
OS variants - mac 路 linux 路 win (catalog picks the entry matching the host OS automatically; macOS / Linux use npx or uvx; Windows uses npx.cmd).
Auth - STDIO
Stability - GA 路 Tier - Tier 2
Required env - -
Tags - global
Tools - discovered on connect; vendor-official STDIO (outbound only to api.search.brave.com) with no per-tool descriptors, so each tool composes to L2 - Low on its own connection's Inspector:
Tools (8) - brave_web_search 路 brave_local_search 路 brave_video_search 路 brave_image_search 路 brave_news_search 路 brave_summarizer 路 brave_place_search 路 brave_llm_context
brave_web_search- general web search with filtering. L2 - Lowbrave_local_search- find local businesses and places. L2 - Lowbrave_video_search- search videos with metadata and thumbnails. L2 - Lowbrave_image_search- search for images. L2 - Lowbrave_news_search- search current news articles. L2 - Lowbrave_summarizer- AI-generated summary over web-search results. L2 - Lowbrave_place_search- points of interest in a geographic area. L2 - Lowbrave_llm_context- pre-extracted page content for LLM grounding / RAG. L2 - Low
Description
[macOS] Brave Search API - web, local, news, image, and video search. Outbound calls only to api.search.brave.com (no SSRF surface).
Prereq: Node.js 18+ on macOS (Homebrew, nvm, or installer). Free API key (2k req/month) at https://api.search.brave.com/app/keys.
The activated form is pre-filled to run: npx -y @brave/brave-search-mcp-server
Required - set BRAVE_API_KEY in the env section below (treat as a secret).
Workflow combinations露
Five remote search services and one community stdio entry. They're substitutable but each has a different latency / quality / quota profile, so the meaningful "combination" is choosing one as primary and one as fallback:
- Primary + fallback -
Tavily(LLM-tuned answers) primary,Exa(semantic search) fallback. Tavily fails fast on quota; Exa picks up. - Crawl + index -
Firecrawl(crawls + structured extract) feeding a downstream Vector Database run. Good when the agent needs the content of pages, not just the URLs. - Search-engine results -
SerpAPIwhen you specifically want Google / Bing SERP JSON without scraping. - Long-form context retrieval -
Jina AIfor embedding + reader API; the model gets cleaned-up article bodies, not raw HTML. - Privacy-first local-stdio -
Brave Search(stdio) when you don't want a remote OAuth dance and you have a Brave API key.
Auth & secrets露
All six entries are API-key gated. Set the key as a ${VAR} placeholder in the form (header for remote, env for stdio):
| Connection | Auth | Env / header |
|---|---|---|
| Tavily | API key | Authorization: Bearer ${TAVILY_API_KEY} |
| Exa | API key | x-api-key: ${EXA_API_KEY} |
| Firecrawl | Bearer | Authorization: Bearer ${FIRECRAWL_API_KEY} |
| Jina AI | Bearer | Authorization: Bearer ${JINA_API_KEY} |
| SerpAPI | API key (query param style; configurable as ${SERPAPI_API_KEY}) |
per-vendor docs |
| Brave Search (stdio) | API key | env.BRAVE_API_KEY = ${BRAVE_API_KEY} |
Every remote vendor on this page ships a free tier large enough for tutorial-scale agent use - the free quotas are intended for evaluation, not production, but a single agent session won't exhaust them.
Picking guide露
| If you need... | Reach for |
|---|---|
| LLM-shaped answers with citations | Tavily |
| Neural / semantic search | Exa |
| Crawl + structured extract | Firecrawl |
| Embedding-friendly reader API | Jina AI |
| Raw SERP JSON | SerpAPI |
| Privacy-first, local-process search | Brave Search (stdio) |