What it does
Exposes the Brave Search API as an MCP server, providing web search, local business search, place lookup, image and video search, news retrieval, and AI-powered summarization. The server defaults to STDIO transport as of v2.x but supports HTTP as an alternative.
Who it's for
Backend engineers wiring Claude into search-augmented AI agents, QA teams building research tools that need current information, and developers integrating multi-modal search (web, images, news) into document analysis and fact-checking pipelines.
Common use cases
- Ground LLM reasoning with recent news results on a query topic.
- Search for local businesses and places with ratings, hours, and AI-generated descriptions (Pro plan).
- Fetch images with metadata for document assembly and web context.
- Generate AI summaries from web results with inline source attribution.
- Filter searches by country, language, and freshness to narrow results.
Setup pitfalls
- CI is currently failing; validate compatibility with your Claude version before deploying.
- Version 2.x defaults to STDIO transport; if upgrading from v1.x on HTTP, set
BRAVE_MCP_TRANSPORT=http. - v2.x image search no longer returns base64-encoded data; clients must fetch image URLs separately.
- Pro features (
extra_snippets, full local search) require a Brave Search Pro subscription; free tier falls back to web search.