veris

· npx -y veris-mcp

Provenance-first web access for AI agents. Clean content plus verifiable source metadata, in one call.

Today an AI agent reading the web gets a wall of text. It does not get: when the page was published, whether the content changed since last time, who wrote it, the canonical source, or the license terms. veris attaches all of that to every read.

web_read("https://example.com/article")
  → clean markdown
  + { publishedAt, modifiedAt, author, canonicalUrl, contentHash, license, fetchedAt }

That metadata is not a nice-to-have. It is the foundation the rest of the AI-web economy needs: freshness, change-detection, citation, and — eventually — paying the people who wrote the content.

Why this exists

The web is being scraped by AI with no attribution and no payment. Publishers are responding by blocking bots and locking content. AI gets worse; publishers lose. The fix is a layer between agents and publishers that reads cleanly, tracks provenance, and (later) settles payment.

veris is the agent-side of that layer — the SDK every agent imports to consume the web responsibly. Think "Plaid for the AI web": you don't own the publishers, you own the integration developers reach for.

Related MCP server: Deep Research MCP Server

Roadmap (one codebase, three stages)

The Stage 3 seams already exist in the code (policy.ts, cache.ts) so growth is additive, not a rewrite.

Tools

Web

Finance — SEC EDGAR (free, official, no API key)

Why EDGAR first? Filings carry authoritative dates and identifiers straight from the SEC — provenance isn't guessed, it's official. Free, structured, no auth. One call gets an agent the latest 10-K with a verifiable source:

finance_filing_read({ query: "NVDA", formType: "10-K" })
  → NVIDIA CORP — 10-K (filed 2026-02-25)
    clean text + { source, filed date, contentHash, wordCount }

Watch — change detection & alerts

Install

npx -y veris-mcp        # zero-install, always latest

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/jakeyoung1/veris && cd veris
npm install && npm run build

Optional env:

export BRAVE_API_KEY=your_key                      # better search; https://search.brave.com/app/keys
export SEC_USER_AGENT="Your Name you@email.com"    # SEC fair-access policy (recommended)

Without a Brave key, search falls back to keyless DuckDuckGo automatically. SEC requires a Name email@domain style User-Agent — veris ships a default, but set your own contact.

Use in Claude Code

Add to your MCP config (.mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "veris": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "veris-mcp"],
      "env": { "BRAVE_API_KEY": "optional", "SEC_USER_AGENT": "Your Name you@email.com" }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Code, then ask it to web_research something.

Remote server (HTTP)

Run veris as a remote MCP server (Streamable HTTP) and connect from any MCP client by URL:

npx -y veris-mcp http                            # http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp
VERIS_HTTP_HOST=0.0.0.0 npx -y veris-mcp http    # expose it (put TLS in front)

Self-hosting is free, forever. VERIS_API_KEYS exists so a hosted instance can be metered.

Docker

docker build -t veris .
docker run -p 8787:8787 veris

Works as-is on Fly.io / Render / Railway — anything that runs a Dockerfile.

Design notes

• Provenance from raw HTML. We fetch the page ourselves and pull dates/author/canonical from <meta>, JSON-LD, and Open Graph before readability strips them.

• Content hash. sha256 of extracted text — detects whether a page changed and enables dedupe across agents (the basis for a shared web index).

• Provider interface. Swap search backends without touching tool code.

• Cache → ledger. The same keyed store that caches reads today records read events for settlement tomorrow.

License

MIT