Web Research MCP — Search, Fetch & Synthesize

An MCP server for AI agents that need to search the web, read pages, and synthesize research — all in a single tool call.

Pay-per-use. No subscription. No idle charges. Powered by Apify Standby.

What it does

Three tools, designed to work together:

Quick connect

Add to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "web-research": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://idapixl--web-research-mcp.apify.actor/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN with your token from apify.com/account/integrations.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add web-research https://idapixl--web-research-mcp.apify.actor/mcp --transport http

Cursor / Windsurf — add via Settings > MCP Servers > HTTP URL.

Pricing

Pay only for what you use. Charged per tool call.

Brave Search API setup (optional but recommended)

By default the actor uses DuckDuckGo HTML scraping, which works without any key. For better results and freshness filtering:

1. Go to brave.com/search/api and sign up for the free tier (2,000 queries/month)

2. Copy your API key

3. In the actor input, set Brave Search API Key (stored as secret — never exposed in logs)

When the key is set, web_search and research_topic will use Brave Search automatically. DuckDuckGo is the fallback on error.

Example tool calls

Search with freshness filter (Brave only)

{
  "tool": "web_search",
  "arguments": {
    "query": "Claude 4 release announcement",
    "maxResults": 5,
    "freshness": "pw"
  }
}

Read a page — links extraction mode

{
  "tool": "fetch_page",
  "arguments": {
    "url": "https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/getting-started",
    "extractMode": "links"
  }
}

Deep research with focus

{
  "tool": "research_topic",
  "arguments": {
    "topic": "Model Context Protocol",
    "maxSources": 3,
    "focus": "pricing and monetization"
  }
}

Input configuration

Tool reference

web_search

• query (required) — search query, max 500 chars

• maxResults (optional) — 1–10, default 5

• freshness (optional) — pd past day, pw past week, pm past month, py past year (Brave only)

fetch_page

• url (required) — page URL

• timeoutSecs (optional) — 5–120, default 30

• extractMode (optional) — article main content (default), full entire body, links all links

research_topic

• topic (required) — research topic or question, max 500 chars

• maxSources (optional) — 1–5, default 3

• focus (optional) — sub-question to narrow the research (e.g. "performance benchmarks"), max 200 chars

Notes

• Stateless: each MCP request gets an isolated server instance

• research_topic scores relevance, deduplicates near-duplicate sources (>70% sentence overlap filtered), and extracts key sentences containing your query terms

• Proxy: Apify Residential proxies improve success rates on pages that block datacenter IPs

• Charges fire before execution — if a page fails to load after charging, the tool returns an error

Built by Idapixl. TypeScript, MCP SDK 1.x, Apify SDK 3.x.