Brave Search gives your agents privacy-focused web, image, video, news, and local search, plus AI-generated summaries, all powered by Brave’s independent search index. Because Brave doesn’t track users or personalize results, the results your agent gets back are the same neutral, unfiltered results anyone would get, which makes them well suited for research and fact-finding tasks.
What It Provides
| Category | Capability |
|---|
| Web search | Organic web results with rich metadata, optionally mixed with FAQ, discussion, news, video, and location results. Useful for general research and grounding an agent’s answers in current information. |
| Image search | Finds images relevant to a query. |
| Video search | Finds videos related to a topic, with duration, thumbnail, and publisher metadata. |
| News search | Finds recent articles and coverage on a topic. |
| Local search | Looks up business and place details, like ratings, phone numbers, and hours, for locations surfaced by a prior web search. |
| Summarizer | Generates an AI summary of a web search’s results, with optional inline source citations. |
| No tracking and no filter-bubble personalization | Results aren’t skewed by a user’s search history. |
Getting an API Key
Brave Search organizes API access into two plans, Search and Answers. Every tool covered in this doc runs on the Search plan except the summarizer, which needs Answers instead. See Tools and Plan Requirements below for which tools need which plan.
- Go to the Brave Search API dashboard and sign in or create a Brave account.
- Subscribe to the Search plan, and to Answers as well if you want the summarizer tool. Each plan includes $5 of credit every month, which covers roughly 1,000 requests on Search.
- Copy your Subscription Token from the dashboard. The same token authenticates both plans.
Pricing is set by Brave, not Airia. Current rates and plan names are listed on the Brave Search API pricing page and can change independently of this page. Connecting to Airia
- Find Brave Search in the server catalogue when building an MCP Deployment or MCP Gateway, or add it from Server Management.
- When prompted for a credential, paste in the Subscription Token you copied from the Brave dashboard.
- Save and test the connection.
Once connected, Brave Search can be added like any other server to a Gateway or Deployment your agents use.
Brave Search authenticates with a single Subscription Token rather than an OAuth app, so there’s no scope to grant, every tool authenticates the same way. What actually gates a tool is which Brave Search plan the token is subscribed to, Search or Answers. Tools on the Search plan work as soon as you connect a token subscribed to it; the summarizer needs the token to also be subscribed to Answers.
Web Search
| Tool | What it does | Plan required |
|---|
brave_web_search | Performs a web search and returns organic results with titles, descriptions, and URLs. Can also return FAQ, discussion, news, video, and location results mixed in, depending on the query. | Search |
Image Search
| Tool | What it does | Plan required |
|---|
brave_image_search | Searches for images relevant to a query, returning titles, thumbnails, dimensions, and source URLs. | Search |
Video Search
| Tool | What it does | Plan required |
|---|
brave_video_search | Searches for videos related to a topic, returning titles, descriptions, durations, and thumbnails. | Search |
News Search
| Tool | What it does | Plan required |
|---|
brave_news_search | Searches for recent news articles on a topic, returning titles, URLs, descriptions, and article snippets. | Search |
Local Search
| Tool | What it does | Plan required |
|---|
brave_local_search | Looks up details, like ratings, phone numbers, and opening hours, for locations returned by a prior brave_web_search call. Needs location IDs from that call’s locations.results[].id field. | Search |
Summarizer
| Tool | What it does | Plan required |
|---|
brave_summarizer_search | Generates an AI summary of a web search’s results, with optional inline citations and entity information. Needs a summary key from a prior brave_web_search call made with summary set to true. | Answers |
Learn More
