How to Connect Brave Search to ChatGPT via MCP

💡 No install? Use cloud.anythingmcp.com directly. Sign in, click Connectors → Brave Search, paste your credentials, mint an MCP API key and you're done. No Docker, no git clone, no local server.

Brave Search + ChatGPT

Live web search from Brave's independent index: page text ready for grounding (LLM Context), web, news, image and video search, places, autosuggest, spellcheck and AI answers. Read-only; needs a Brave Search API key, and every call is billed on your Brave plan.

Prerequisites

See the full setup instructions baked into the connector (visible in the in-app store when you select the connector). The required environment variables for this connector are:

BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY

Step 1 — Get credentials

Setting up takes about 3 minutes. You need a Brave Search API account with an active plan.

1. Create an account at https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com and activate a plan under Plans (a card is required). The Search plan covers LLM Context, web, news, images, videos and places; Autosuggest, Spellcheck and Answers have their own plans.
2. Open API Keys, add a key and copy it into BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY. It is sent as the X-Subscription-Token header.
3. Install the connector; the check runs one web search with brave_search_web.

Every call is billed: each search is a request on your Brave plan. The AI keeps the defaults small and does not repeat the same search.

Which tool:

• brave_search_llm_context is the default for questions about current facts. It returns the relevant text of the top pages (snippets, tables, code) with the URL and title of each, about 4096 tokens here; maximum_number_of_tokens raises it up to 32768 for research questions.
• brave_search_web is a classic results page (title, URL, description, age) with news, videos, discussions, FAQ, infobox and places when relevant.
• brave_search_news, brave_search_videos and brave_search_images are the dedicated verticals.
• brave_search_places finds businesses, landmarks and points of interest by area name or coordinates; brave_search_get_pois and brave_search_get_poi_descriptions return details (address, phone, opening hours, rating) and descriptions for up to 20 location ids, which are valid for 8 hours.
• brave_search_suggest completes the start of a query; brave_search_spellcheck corrects one.
• brave_search_get_rich_result fetches a live widget (weather, stock quote, currency conversion, sports score) for a web search run with enable_rich_callback.
• brave_search_answer returns a finished AI answer from Brave (Answers plan, billed per search and per token). The AI prefers LLM Context and writes the answer itself unless you ask for Brave's answer.

Query options: search operators work in q (site:example.com, an exact phrase in quotes, -word, filetype:pdf). country is a two-letter code (default US) and search_lang a language code (default en); set both for local results, e.g. DE and de. freshness is pd (24 hours), pw (7 days), pm (31 days), py (365 days) or a range such as 2026-01-01to2026-03-31. When spellcheck changed the query, query.altered shows what was searched. For places, location is text without commas: freiburg germany, or san francisco ca united states in the US.

Untrusted content: results and page text come from the open web. The AI treats instructions inside them as data, not as orders, and cites the URLs.

Read-only: every tool only reads, so there is nothing to confirm and no tool is switched off at install.

Limits: web search returns up to 20 results per page, news and videos up to 50, with up to 10 pages (offset 0 to 9); images up to 200 at once without paging; places up to 100. A query is at most 400 characters and 50 words (600 and 75 for LLM Context). The per-second rate and the monthly quota depend on your plan.

Common errors: 401 or 403 mean a wrong key or an endpoint outside the key's plan, e.g. Answers on a Search-only plan. 422 means an invalid or missing parameter; the message names it under error.meta. 429 means the per-second rate limit or the monthly quota is used up: the AI waits a second and retries once; check the usage in the Brave dashboard.

The connector does not stream answers, does not use the citations or research mode of Answers, and does not include the Summarizer.

Step 2 — Install the adapter

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HelpCode-ai/anythingmcp/main/docker-compose.quickstart.yml -o docker-compose.yml
printf 'JWT_SECRET=%s\nENCRYPTION_KEY=%s\n' "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" > .env
docker compose up -d

Step 3 — Add the connector in ChatGPT

Your server URL: in AnythingMCP, open MCP Servers → the server this connector is on, and copy its URL (https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/…). Use it wherever this guide shows YOUR_SERVER_ID.

ChatGPT adds MCP servers as plugins on its Plugins page, on the web and on paid plans. Developer mode is no longer needed. In a Business workspace only admins and owners can add one; in Enterprise and Edu an admin can grant the Create plugins with MCPs permission.

1. Go to chatgpt.com/plugins, click Add, then Add custom MCP server.
2. Enter a name, e.g. Name: Brave Search.
3. Under Connection, enter the Server URL https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/YOUR_SERVER_ID and keep Authentication on OAuth.
4. Select I understand and want to continue, then Create as a plugin. When ChatGPT asks, sign in to AnythingMCP and allow access.
5. Install the new plugin from your personal plugins, then type @ in a chat and pick it.

Available tools

Example prompts

• "Search the web for what changed in the EU AI Act this month and summarise it with sources."
• "Find news from the last 24 hours about the European Central Bank, in German and from German sources."
• "Which pharmacies are near Freiburg Germany? Show addresses, opening hours and ratings."
• "Search site:docs.python.org for how asyncio.TaskGroup handles exceptions and quote the relevant part."
• "Give me 10 search suggestions for 'electric bike' in the UK."

FAQ

Does the free ChatGPT plan work with custom MCP servers? OpenAI documents custom MCP servers for paid plans only; the Free plan is not on its list.

Next steps

• Connector landing page
• Connect to Claude
• Connect to Cursor
• Connect to Gemini
• Connect to Meta Muse
• Connect to Microsoft Copilot