My favourite MCPs: Brave Search

An AI without web access answers from memory and sounds just as confident either way. This is the one that makes mine go and look.

Not sure what an MCP server is or how it’s used? Check out my explainer here.

Brave Search MCP connects an assistant to Brave’s search API, so instead of answering from whatever it absorbed during training, it runs a real search and reads what’s on the web right now. Brave runs its own index rather than reselling someone else’s results, which is why I have it as the default rather than the fallback.

Here’s what that’s actually worth. I got charged for a year’s subscription on a games console account I’d meant to cancel, and the support reply was a flat no — the receipt says purchases are final. I asked Claude to look into it. Brave surfaced the company’s own help page, which said, in their words: “there is also a statutory 14-day right to cancel.” Their documentation contradicting their support desk. That went into my reply, quoted, with the link. I would never have found that page myself, because it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go looking for it.

That’s the shape of it. A language model is trained on a snapshot and then frozen. It doesn’t know what today is, it can’t distinguish a fact it learned from a fact that has since changed, and it will tell you either in exactly the same confident tone. Prices, documentation, policies, release notes — all of it drifts, and none of the drift is visible from inside the model.

There’s also a practical reason it’s the default and not the impressive option. I used to route research to a paid research API. One day an agent invoked it by accident and ran a few hundred queries in the background; I found out when the invoice arrived. Automated searching has to be free, or something you never think about will eventually cost you money while you sleep. So the agents get Brave, and I still use a paid AI search product in my own browser, where every query is one I chose to run.

Making it repeatable

The one-off ask, when I care about being right:

Before you advise me on this, search for the current documentation and tell me what you found and where you found it.

The standing version lives in a skill — a text file of instructions the assistant reads when the work comes up, written in plain English:

Whenever anything time-sensitive comes up:
- Search before answering. Prices, docs, policies and release
  notes are all stale in your training data.
- Give me the link alongside the claim. A claim with no source
  doesn't ship.
- Stitch several cheap searches from different angles rather than
  one expensive deep-research call.
- If a page needs a browser to render, fetch the page properly
  instead of reasoning from the search snippet.
- Say which of your claims came from search and which came from
  memory.

That last rule is the one I’d fight for. The failure I keep seeing is a confident paragraph where two sentences came from a live page and the third came from 2024, with nothing at all marking the join.

It’s also what makes anything unattended worth reading. My daily news round-up genuinely checks this morning’s web rather than reciting last year’s internet. A background check on a company or a person who’s approached me starts from real results. Neither is something I’d let run without me if the tool underneath were working from memory.

The API gives you $5 of credit every month, free and applied automatically, against $5 per thousand requests — so a thousand free searches a month before you owe anything. I have never come close to spending it. The MCP server is open source and setup is an API key and one line of config.

The reply I sent quoted the company’s own page back at them. However that ticket ends, I wouldn’t have had that sentence to write without a search that happened while I was talking.