Diffbot MCP Server

A Diffbot MCP server with a variety of helpful web data handling tools for your agent or LLM pipeline.

What is Diffbot? Diffbot is a small research company building AI that structure the web. Our products connect apps to the structured web automatically, like an API for all of the public web.

Tools

🧬 extract

Web fetch tool alternative. Conventional fetch tools return either 500k+ tokens of HTML or a markdown approximation of the page's content. Extract classifies the page it is fetching and extracts content into a meaningful and consistent JSON structure. Responses are optimized for minimal token usage while maintaining data fidelity. Powered by Diffbot Extract API.

🔎 search_web

Web search tool that ranks accuracy, not popularity. Built on Diffbot's first party web index. Ranking model heavily favors primary sources over secondary sources (e.g. press release > news piece on said press release). Returns markdown formatted content chunks for source citation. Optimized token management built-in.

🪄 enhance

Web lookup tool for organizations and people. Unlike web search, enhance will return structured data from the Diffbot Knowledge Graph on an organization or person (by name, url, or other acceptable input). Helpful for verifying facts, market research, or sales intelligence workflows.

🧠 resolve_entities

Recognize and resolve entities in text. Uses Diffbot NLP to recognize organizations, people, places, addresses, and other proper nouns in text. Entities are resolved to entity IDs in the Diffbot Knowledge Graph from which more context can be retrieved using dql. Keeps hallucinations in check and gives AI the context it needs to navigate deep research.

🕷️ crawl

Find all links on a web page (the seed) and extracts them all. A classic web crawl, with a ontological web extraction bonus. Use crawl to archive documentation, take snapshots of web projects, or site mapping.

🎯 dql

Queries Diffbot Knowledge Graph for organization, person, article, place, and product entities. Diffbot Knowledge Graph contains a Wikipedian scale linked graph database of organizations, people, (news) articles, places, and products. Diffbot MCP converts your prompt into structured queries (dql) and return structured records for post-analysis.

🧭 dql_ontology

Helper utility for accurate dql ontology navigation. Holds the keys to Diffbot's entire ontology and taxonomy reference. Used by Diffbot MCP to craft accurate dql queries. Humans don't need to touch this, but feel free to satisfy your curiosity.

Related MCP server: AgentWebSearch-MCP

Authentication

A free Diffbot token is required for tool use. Get one here.

Get Started

Quick Start

The easiest way to get started is to connect your MCP client directly to the remote MCP server hosted by Diffbot.

https://mcp.diffbot.com/mcp?token=<YOUR_DIFFBOT_TOKEN>

This repo deploys directly to the remote server.

Local Installation

Clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:diffbot/diffbot-mcp.git

Install requirements

pip install .

You can now run the server with python3 diffbot_mcp_server.py, or skip this step if you will be setting this server up with an MCP client.

(Optional) Docker Install

Build the image

docker build -t diffbot-mcp .

Setup with MCP Clients

To setup Claude Desktop, follow the official installation guide and use this example claude_desktop_config.json configuration (replace variables as needed).

This standard config works with most IDEs and environments.

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "diffbot-mcp": {
            "command": "python3",
            "args": [
                "/<YOUR_PROJECT_FOLDER>/diffbot-mcp/diffbot_mcp_server.py"
            ],
            "env": {
                "DIFFBOT_TOKEN": "<YOUR_DIFFBOT_TOKEN>"
            }
        }
    }
}

For Docker installs, follow this configuration.

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "diffbot-mcp": {
            "command": "docker",
            "args": [
                "run",
                "--rm",
                "-i",
                "-e", "DIFFBOT_TOKEN=<YOUR_DIFFBOT_TOKEN>",
                "diffbot-mcp"
            ]
        }
    }
}

For remote setup, simply enter the remote server URL and include "http" as the transport type.

{
  "servers": {
    "diffbot-mcp": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.diffbot.com/mcp/?token=<YOUR_DIFFBOT_TOKEN>"
    }
  }
}

For local setup, try this modified config for better secrets management.

{
	"servers": {
        "diffbot-mcp": {
            "command": "python3",
            "args": [
                "/<YOUR_PROJECT_FOLDER>/diffbot-mcp/diffbot_mcp_server.py"
            ],
            "env": {
                "DIFFBOT_TOKEN": "${input:diffbot-api-key}"
            }
        }
	},
	"inputs": [
		{
			"password": true,
			"id": "diffbot-api-key",
			"type": "promptString",
			"description": "Diffbot API Key"
		}
	]
}

Help & Support

This project is built and maintained by @jeromechoo. For support, file an issue and he'll get back to you as soon as he can. For faster answers, write to sales@diffbot.com 😜.