Agent Search MCP: Free Web Search with Inspectable Evidence

A lightweight, free-first MCP web search router with compact multi-source evidence.

Agent Search MCP is an open-source, self-hosted MCP server and CLI. It gives AI agents a free Tavily alternative or a local search path. The default path starts without an API key and searches English and Chinese sources. Request policy keeps optional paid providers explicit. Shared budgets cap provider calls, search time, admitted results, and evidence size.

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Install

npx -y agent-search-mcp

Requires Node.js >= 18.17. The default runtime does not require a browser, database, Python, or a search API account.

Connect an MCP client

Use this stdio configuration in MCP clients that accept mcpServers JSON, including Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, and Windsurf:

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

Claude Code and Codex can register the same npx -y agent-search-mcp stdio command through their MCP settings.

Add the optional Agent Skill

After connecting the MCP server, Agent Skills-compatible clients can install the repository-owned routing guide:

npx skills add lennney/agent-search-mcp --skill agent-search

Invoke it with a request such as Use $agent-search to verify this claim with official sources. The Agent Search Skill chooses one of four bounded paths: quick discovery, stricter verification, Chinese-source search, or extraction of a selected URL. It checks that the needed MCP tool exists and asks before any install or configuration change. Installing the Skill does not start or configure the MCP server.

Example: inspect a bounded search result

After building the local package, run a CLI query without adding a provider key:

npm run build
fasm search "MCP server without an API key" --json

The response contract keeps result evidence, meta.execution, and partialFailures separate. A provider timeout or challenge remains visible to the agent instead of being converted into an unexplained empty result. This is a contract example, not a live availability or search-quality benchmark.

After a global install, check the local runtime without making a search request:

npm install -g agent-search-mcp
fasm doctor

Why Agent Search MCP

The difference from a plain multi-engine wrapper

The one-minute offline demo replays these differences through the production evidence scorer and formatter:

Inspect the search evidence

Each JSON response includes one Search Evidence Packet. It answers the routing questions an agent needs before it uses a result:

Run the one-minute offline contract demo:

npm run demo:evidence
npm run demo:evidence -- --json

It replays three synthetic scenarios through the production evidence scorer, formatter, and MCP output helper: same-family adapter overlap, visible fallback failure, and a bounded quality-gate stop. It makes no live availability or search-quality claim and performs no network request.

The default free_first policy never spends a configured API credential. free_only blocks paid providers. quality_escalation can call one configured paid provider after free evidence misses the quality gate, while paid_first tries that provider before the free fallback.

Request budgets cap adapter attempts, elapsed time, and admitted results. The evidence budget caps query-relevant passages across the complete response. Compact mode keeps full detail for the first results and reduces later entries to source-preserving references.

Measured token reduction

The checked-in bilingual fixture measures formatting with a locked tokenizer:

This fixture verifies output formatting and evidence-packet behavior. It does not measure live engine availability or search quality. See the benchmark method and limitations.

How the search router works

flowchart LR
    A["AI agent"] --> M["MCP search tools"]
    M --> P["Provider and request policy"]
    P --> F["Zero-key sources"]
    P --> O["Optional paid provider"]
    F --> E["Deduplicate, rank, and preserve failures"]
    O --> E
    E --> B["Evidence and token budget"]
    B --> R["Compact multi-source result"]

The router evaluates each search batch against separate result, relevance, confidence, and provider-family gates. It stops after the evidence passes those gates and exposes the decision in meta.execution. Provider failures stay visible in partialFailures, so an empty result cannot hide an upstream error.

The competitive landscape (2026-08-07) maps the crowded baseline and the product gaps. It records source dates and fixed commits for facts that can change. The 2026-08-10 update adds competitor activity since then: direct local competitors are dormant, and token-efficient evidence is becoming an industry-explicit lever. The earlier source-level product comparison contains the architecture-specific evidence.

Engines

The runtime registers 16 adapters: 9 zero-key adapters and 7 optional API adapters.

Tools