Brave Search (archived)
Brave Search MCP is the archived reference server that let an MCP client query the Brave Search API over stdio, exposing web search and local business search as tools. It still installs from npm under the modelcontextprotocol scope, but the package is marked no longer supported. Brave now ships its own maintained server; this one is the historical version, kept breathing by the registry alone.
How we started it
npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-searchSkip it, and install Brave's own maintained server instead. We started it with a clean environment and it never reached initialize: npm printed a deprecation notice for version 0.6.2, the process complained that BRAVE_API_KEY was missing, and it exited with code 1 (measured 2026-08-19). The key requirement is fair enough, since a search server without an API key has nothing to search with, but the deprecation is the part that matters. Even if you feed it a key and it starts, you are running abandoned code against a paid API.
Use it if
Skip it if
The bill for your context window
No Context Tax figure exists for this server, and the reason it does not exist is the finding. The server died before initialize, so tools/list was never served and the recorded token estimate is zero rather than small. For scale, the heaviest server we measured in the same batch, Notion, carries a tool list weighing several thousand tokens at the 4-chars-per-token estimate used everywhere in this directory. A search server usually sits far below that, since two or three tools with short schemas do not need much prose, so context cost was never the reason to avoid this one. The maintenance status is.
Setup reality
One environment variable, BRAVE_API_KEY, is the whole gate, and it is a hard requirement rather than a warning: the server reads it at startup and exits if it is absent. That key comes from a Brave Search API subscription, which has a free tier with a rate limit and paid tiers above it, so setup is really an account signup with a credit card on file, not a config edit. Transport is stdio via npx, no ports and no OAuth dance. On our probe run the npm resolve step also emitted the deprecation warning before any server output, which is worth knowing if you parse stderr for health checks, because the first thing you will read is a complaint about the package rather than about your config.
BRAVE_API_KEYQuestions people ask
Why does the Brave Search MCP server exit immediately?
It requires BRAVE_API_KEY in the environment and quits if the variable is unset. Our clean-environment probe hit exactly that: the process wrote the error and exited with code 1 before completing initialize. Set the key in your client's env block for the server and it will get further.
Is this the same as Brave's official MCP server?
No. This is the archived Anthropic reference implementation under the modelcontextprotocol npm scope, and npm reports it as no longer supported. Brave maintains a separate first-party search server under its own scope, and that is the one to install for new work.
Do I need a paid Brave Search plan to use it?
You need an API key, which means a Brave Search API account. Brave's docs describe a free tier with a monthly query allowance plus paid plans, and the key works the same either way. The server does not care which plan issued it.
Can I still install it?
Yes, npx will resolve and run it, and version 0.6.2 came down fine on our run. It prints a deprecation notice first and then behaves like an unmaintained package: it works until Brave's API changes underneath it, and nobody is on the other end when it does.
Other search servers we started
| Server | Vendor | Boots | Context tax |
|---|---|---|---|
| DuckDuckGo Search | community | ✗ | ~0 tokens |
| Exa | Exa Labs | ✓ | ~534 tokens |
| Tavily | Tavily | ✓ | ~1,924 tokens |
How this page is made: the server is spawned as an unprivileged user with a clean environment and no credentials, then asked for its tools, resources and prompts over stdio. Token figures are estimates at four characters per token, not a tokenizer count. One run, one machine. Corrections: contact the desk.