Best MCP Servers for Web Search — SearchHive, Tavily, and More

MCP (Model Context Protocol) has become the standard way to give AI agents access to external tools. Web search is one of the most critical capabilities — whether your agent needs to answer factual questions, find current information, or research topics in real time.

The MCP server ecosystem for web search has grown rapidly. Here are the best options in 2026, from dedicated search APIs with MCP adapters to community-built servers that wrap popular services.

Key Takeaways

• SearchHive MCP Server provides the most complete web search + scraping + extraction in a single MCP server
• Tavily MCP is the most popular dedicated search MCP server with excellent documentation and easy setup
• Brave Search MCP leverages Brave's independent index with generous free usage
• Exa MCP focuses on semantic/neural search rather than keyword matching
• Community DuckDuckGo servers offer free search but with reliability limitations
• For production agents, dedicated API-backed servers (SearchHive, Tavily) are worth the cost over free alternatives

What MCP Web Search Servers Do

An MCP server for web search exposes web search as a tool that an AI agent can call during its reasoning loop. The agent decides when to search, what to search for, and how to use the results — all without human intervention.

Key capabilities to evaluate:

• Search quality — relevance and freshness of results
• Response format — structured free JSON formatter that's easy for agents to parse
• Content extraction — can the server also fetch full page content, not just snippets?
• Rate limits — how many searches per minute/day?
• Pricing — free tier availability and cost at scale
• Setup complexity — configuration, authentication, dependencies

1. SearchHive MCP Server

Best for: Production agents needing search + scraping + extraction in one server

SearchHive's MCP server is the most feature-complete option. It exposes three tool categories: SwiftSearch (web search), ScrapeForge (page scraping), and DeepDive (research synthesis).

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "searchhive": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@searchhive/mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "SEARCHHIVE_API_KEY": "sh_live_..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Available tools:

• swift_search — Google/Bing web search with structured results
• swift_search_context — Search results optimized for LLM context windows
• scrape_page — Scrape any URL, returns clean markdown
• crawl_site — Crawl multiple pages from a site
• extract_data — Structured data extraction from pages
• deep_research — Multi-step research with automatic source gathering

Pricing: Free tier with 500 searches + 1,000 scrape credits/month. Paid plans from $12/month.

The advantage of a unified MCP server is reduced complexity. Your agent has search, scraping, and extraction through a single connection — no managing multiple MCP server processes, no separate API keys, no coordination logic.

# What an agent sees when using SearchHive MCP
# Tool call: swift_search
# {"query": "latest developments in transformer architecture 2026"}
# Returns: [{title, url, snippet, content}, ...]

# Tool call: scrape_page
# {"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12345"}
# Returns: markdown content of the paper's abstract page

# Tool call: extract_data
# {"url": "...", "schema": {"method": "string", "results": "string"}}
# Returns: structured extraction results

2. Tavily MCP Server

Best for: Simple search integration, well-documented setup, Claude Desktop users

Tavily is the most widely adopted search MCP server. It's the default in many Claude Desktop configurations and has extensive documentation.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tavily": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "tavily-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "TAVILY_API_KEY": "tvly-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Available tools:

• tavily_search — Web search with answer generation
• tavily_extract — Extract content from URLs

Pricing:

• Free: 1,000 searches/month
• Plus: $40/month (5,000 searches)
• Pro: $100/month (10,000 searches)
• Enterprise: Custom

Tavily's answer generation is useful — it doesn't just return search results, it synthesizes an answer from the sources. This reduces the number of follow-up API calls your agent needs to make.

The limitation is scope. Tavily is search-focused. Extraction exists but is basic compared to ScrapeForge's structured extraction. No crawl functionality, no batch processing.

3. Brave Search MCP

Best for: Privacy-focused agents, generous free tier, independent search index

Brave's MCP server provides access to their independent web index through MCP.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave-search": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@anthropic-ai/brave-search-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "BSA-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Pricing: Free tier with 2,000 queries/month. Pay-as-you-go at $3/1K queries for standard search, $5/1K for AI-optimized results.

Brave's independent index is the key differentiator. Your agent's search results come from Brave's web crawler, not Google or Bing. This matters for diversity of sources and avoiding search engine optimization bias.

The MCP server is straightforward — web search only, no scraping or extraction. Pair it with a separate MCP server for content fetching if you need full page content.

4. Exa MCP Server

Best for: Semantic search, finding conceptually similar content, research agents

Exa (formerly Metaphor) takes a neural/embedding-based approach to search. Instead of keyword matching, it understands the meaning behind queries.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "exa": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "exa-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "EXA_API_KEY": "exa-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Pricing:

• Free: 1,000 searches/month
• Starter: $100/month (10,000 searches)
• Growth: $250/month (100,000 searches)

Exa excels at queries like "research papers on attention mechanisms in vision transformers" where keyword matching might miss relevant papers that use different terminology. The neural approach finds conceptually related content.

The downside is cost and latency. At $100/month for 10K searches, Exa is expensive per query. Semantic search also tends to be slower than keyword search.

5. DuckDuckGo Community MCP Servers

Best for: Free search, personal agents, experimentation

Several community-built MCP servers wrap DuckDuckGo's search API. These are free and require no API key.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ddg-search": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "duckduckgo-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Pricing: Free, no API key required.

The tradeoff is reliability. DuckDuckGo actively blocks automated access, and community servers frequently break when DDG updates their anti-bot measures. For production agents, this is a liability. For personal projects or prototyping, it's a reasonable starting point.

6. Google Custom Search MCP

Best for: Agents needing Google results specifically, teams already using Google Cloud

Google's Custom Search API can be wrapped in an MCP server. Several community implementations exist.

Pricing: Free tier of 100 queries/day (3,000/month). $5/1K queries beyond that.

The free tier is useful for low-volume agents. The limitation is Google's search-only scope — no image search, news search, or other verticals in the free tier.

Comparison Table

Choosing Based on Agent Type

Research agents need deep search capabilities — SearchHive or Exa. The ability to search, fetch full pages, and extract structured data in a single MCP connection matters when agents make multiple search-fetch-extract cycles.

Customer support agents need fast, accurate answers — Tavily's answer synthesis is valuable here. Low latency and pre-synthesized answers reduce response time.

Coding assistants need technical search — SearchHive's ability to scrape documentation pages and return clean markdown is ideal for fetching API docs, library references, and Stack Overflow threads.

Data gathering agents need breadth and volume — Brave's generous free tier or DuckDuckGo for cost-free operation, SearchHive for quality at scale.

Recommendation

For production AI agents, the SearchHive MCP server provides the most complete toolset. Search, scraping, and extraction in a single MCP connection means fewer server processes to manage, fewer API keys, and more capable agents.

Start with the free tier (500 searches + 1,000 scrapes/month) by adding the SearchHive server to your MCP config. If your agent only needs basic search, Tavily or Brave Search are solid alternatives with simpler setup.

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Give your AI agent web search, scraping, and extraction in a single MCP connection. SearchHive's MCP server starts free. See the setup guide.