Brave Search MCP Server: Setup, API Key, and Pricing (2026)

The Brave Search MCP server connects AI assistants to live web search through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard Anthropic created in November 2024. Brave builds and maintains the server in the brave/brave-search-mcp-server repository, registries list it as the official implementation, and it exposes web, local business, image, video, and news search plus AI summarization through the Brave Search API.

One date governs everything a tutorial tells you about this server: February 12, 2026. Brave eliminated the free API tier that every earlier guide assumes, and replaced it with metered credits (implicator.ai, February 12, 2026). Guides published as late as March 2026 still teach the dead free tier, and some still teach the archived 2025 package. This page carries the current facts on both.

This page covers the six search capabilities, the pricing as it stands after the change, the API key and where it goes, the exact configuration per client, the subscription-token and connection errors with their fixes, and the difference between this server and the similarly named Brave Browser automation server.

All web search MCP servers · What MCP is and how it works

What Does the Brave Search MCP Server Expose?

The Brave Search MCP server exposes six capabilities: web search, local points-of-interest search, image search, video search, news search, and AI-powered summarization. The model takes a query, picks the search type, and reads structured results back into context.

Capability	What the model gets
Web search	Organic results with configurable counts, pagination, and freshness filters (past day, week, month, year, or custom range)
News search	Articles and trending topics with temporal filtering
Image search	Image results with bulk retrieval up to 50 per call
Video search	Web video results
Local points of interest	Businesses, restaurants, and services; gated to a higher API plan
AI summarization	Summarized answers built on Brave’s AI-centric result tier

The freshness filters are the working core: “search for reviews from the past week” maps to a filtered call instead of a prompt-side hope. The summarizer is the token saver: a digested answer costs less context than a result list the model parses itself. Developer threads rank the server among the best general-purpose options for exactly that output cleanliness, and Brave’s own positioning leans on it: the API page calls it the leading search tool for applications using Claude MCP (brave.com).

Four workflows show what the capability set produces in practice:

Grounded answers. “What changed in the MCP specification this quarter?” runs a freshness-filtered web search and answers from dated results instead of the training cutoff.
Monitoring on a schedule. An n8n workflow runs the same filtered news search daily and routes new results onward, the automation pairing the n8n section below configures.
Local lookups. “Find coffee shops near the venue that open before 7” calls the points-of-interest search, on plans where it is enabled.
Visual sourcing. “Pull 20 images of mid-century lobby design” uses the bulk image retrieval, up to 50 results in one call.

What Does the Brave Search API Cost in 2026?

The Brave Search API has no free tier since February 12, 2026. New accounts receive $5 in monthly prepaid credits, queries bill at $0.003 to $0.005 each depending on endpoint, and a credit card is required at signup (implicator.ai, February 12, 2026; AgentDeals pricing tracker).

The arithmetic: $5 in credits covers 1,000 to 1,666 queries per month depending on endpoint rate, down from the 2,000 free queries the original tier carried since May 2023, which the August 2025 AI Grounding update had briefly raised to 5,000. Overages bill to the card with no spending cap, and result attribution is required under the plan terms. The rate limit on the credit plan is 50 requests per second.

The change also settled a licensing trap most users never saw. The old free tier’s terms prohibited using responses for AI inference, which is precisely what every MCP user was doing; a GitHub issue against the reference servers repository drew 35 comments debating whether the whole integration violated the terms before closing unresolved. The current plan includes AI inference rights in the metered price, so the use that was contractually gray is now simply billed (implicator.ai, February 12, 2026).

Budget control follows directly: an agent loop that retries searches spends real money with no cap to stop it. Watch usage in the first week of any new workflow, and treat the per-query price as part of the token economics.

How Do You Get and Set the Brave API Key?

Create the key at brave.com/search/api, then pass it to the server through the BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable. The signup flow requires the card, issues the monthly credits, and the dashboard’s API Keys section holds the key string.

The server reads the key from the environment, never from a command-line argument that would land in shell history. The Brave API itself authenticates requests with that key as a subscription token, which is why an invalid or exhausted key surfaces as a subscription-token error, the first case in the troubleshooting section below.

How Do You Set Up the Brave Search MCP Server?

Set up the Brave Search MCP server by adding one npx command and the API key to your client’s config: npx -y brave-search-mcp with BRAVE_API_KEY in the env block. The base config every client builds on:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave-search": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "brave-search-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop

The base block goes in claude_desktop_config.json, followed by a full application quit and relaunch; Brave’s own walkthrough for this client has existed since May 6, 2025 and predates the pricing change, so take the steps from it and the costs from this page. The client walkthrough is at set up MCP in Claude Desktop.

Claude Code

Add the server with the env flag in one command:

claude mcp add brave-search --env BRAVE_API_KEY=your_key_here -- npx -y brave-search-mcp

The full client walkthrough is at set up MCP in Claude Code.

Cursor and other IDE clients

Cursor takes the base block in .cursor/mcp.json at the project root; keep the key in an environment reference rather than committing it with the repository. OpenCode and LM Studio take the same stdio command in their MCP configs, and the no-key alternatives on the search hub fit LM Studio stacks where the metered key defeats the purpose. Client steps are at add MCP servers to Cursor and the other setup guides.

n8n

n8n connects the server through its MCP client node: register the same npx command and env variable, and workflow nodes call the search tools like any other n8n step. The automation pairing serves scheduled monitoring, the searches bill against the same credits.

ChatGPT and HTTP mode

The vendor server speaks stdio for desktop clients. Community variants such as mikechao’s brave-search-mcp run the same Brave API in HTTP mode with a web UI, which is the path that reaches ChatGPT’s web interface. The searches in autocomplete for a “Brave MCP server URL” point at this gap: Brave publishes no hosted remote endpoint, so a URL-based setup means either a community HTTP variant you host or the AWS Marketplace deployment below.

Docker and AWS

Docker’s official mcp/brave-search image containerizes the server for stacks that prefer images to npx, and an AWS Marketplace listing packages it for cloud deployment. Both take the same BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable.

Verify the connection

A working connection lists the search tools in the client’s MCP panel, and the prompt “search the web for MCP specification news from this week” returns dated results. A connection that lists tools but fails every call is the key case below.

Why Isn’t the Brave Search MCP Server Working?

The three most common failures are a subscription-token error from an invalid or exhausted key, a connection failure from a missing runtime, and a config built on the archived 2025 package or its dead free tier.

Calls fail with a subscription-token error. The Brave API authenticates with the key as a subscription token, so this error means the key: mistyped, revoked, or out of credits. Check the key string against the dashboard, and check the usage meter; since February 2026, an exhausted $5 credit block stops queries the way an invalid key does.
“Could not connect to MCP server brave-search.” The client failed to launch the server process. The usual cause is the runtime: npx needs Node.js installed and in PATH, and the first run needs network access to fetch the package. The cross-client checklist is at fix MCP connection errors.
The config runs npx @modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search. That is the archived 2025 reference server, no longer updated, and tutorials still circulate it. Replace the package with the vendor’s brave-search-mcp; the maintenance-recency rule from the server directory applies between generations of the same server.
A guide promised 2,000 free queries and the dashboard shows a card requirement. The guide predates February 12, 2026. The free tier is gone; the pricing section above carries the current numbers.

A working server now answers from today’s web on a metered key. What the similarly named Brave server does instead, and when a rival fits better, is the supplementary half of this page.

Is Brave Search MCP the Same as Brave Browser MCP?

No. The Brave Search MCP server queries the Brave Search API for results; Brave Browser MCP servers automate the Brave browser itself, opening tabs and navigating pages. The names collide and the categories differ: search servers return result data, browser servers drive a real browser window. A community server such as mcp2everything’s Brave Browser implementation belongs to the browser-automation category, where the Playwright MCP server is the maintained default. Pick by the verb: searching takes this page’s server, browsing takes that category.

Should You Use the Brave Search MCP Server or Tavily?

Use Brave for general web results across web, news, image, and video, and Tavily when an agent pipeline consumes digested answers instead of result lists. Brave returns the classic result set with freshness filters and a summarizer on top; Tavily returns LLM-ready extracts built for chains that never show a human the links. Both bill per query against a key. The wider alternative set, Exa for semantic research, Firecrawl for reading pages, and the no-key scrapers for zero-budget stacks, sits in one matrix at the web search hub. The head-to-head with both servers run against the same tasks is at Brave vs Tavily MCP.

Brave Search MCP Server Questions

Is the Brave Search MCP Server Free?

The server software is free and open-source; the API behind it is not, since February 12, 2026. New accounts get $5 in monthly credits, 1,000 to 1,666 queries depending on endpoint, with a card required and overages billed beyond it. Guides describing a 2,000-query free tier describe the pricing that ended on that date. Zero-budget setups take a no-key scraper from the web search hub instead.

What Is the Brave Search MCP Server?

The Brave Search MCP server is Brave’s official server connecting AI assistants to the Brave Search API for web, local, image, video, and news search with AI summarization. Brave maintains it in the brave/brave-search-mcp-server repository, it runs locally through npx -y brave-search-mcp, and it authenticates with a BRAVE_API_KEY from the developer dashboard.

Is There an MCP Server for Google Search?

No official one. Google publishes no search MCP server, and community scrapers fill the gap with the fragility scraping carries. Brave’s server is the closest stable, contractually backed substitute for general results. The full Google-gap answer and the no-key options live on the web search hub.

How Do You Get a Brave Search API Key?

Sign up at brave.com/search/api, add the required card, and copy the key from the dashboard’s API Keys section. The account starts with $5 in monthly prepaid credits, and the key goes into the BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable in your client’s server config, never hardcoded into committed files.

Every query on this page runs through that one key: it authenticates the call, meters the cost, and stops working the moment the credits do. Set it once, cap what the workflow can spend, and the model’s answers come from an index that updated today.

What Does the Brave Search MCP Server Do and How Do You Set It Up?