searchapi-mcp

A Model Context Protocol server for SearchApi.io. It gives any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, or your own agent) live, structured results from Google, Google Jobs, Shopping, News, Scholar, Maps, YouTube and 100+ other engines, trimmed down to what a model actually needs.

Why trimming matters

Raw SERP JSON is designed to be complete, not to fit in a context window. One Google Shopping response is about 217 KB, mostly base64 thumbnails and multi-KB product tokens. Passing that to a model costs tens of thousands of tokens and pushes out everything else in the conversation. Each tool here keeps only the fields an agent reasons with: titles, prices, dates, authors, citation counts, links and pagination.

Measured on live responses (Nov 2026):

Related MCP server: free-search-mcp

Tools

Every tool returns the same envelope:

• results and result_count, always.

• next_page when there's more. Pass it back to the same tool to get the next page.

• notice when SearchApi returns no results. This is not a tool error, so the agent can try something else.

See examples/ for real outputs and prompts to try.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/sudo-dk/searchapi-mcp.git
cd searchapi-mcp
npm install
npm run build

Get an API key at searchapi.io.

Use with Claude Desktop

Add the server to claude_desktop_config.json (~/Library/Application Support/Claude/ on macOS, %APPDATA%\Claude\ on Windows), then restart Claude Desktop.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "searchapi": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/searchapi-mcp/dist/index.js"],
      "env": { "SEARCHAPI_API_KEY": "your_key_here" }
    }
  }
}

If you'd rather not keep the key in the Claude config, put it in the project's .env and let Node load it (Node 20.6+):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "searchapi": {
      "command": "/opt/homebrew/bin/node",
      "args": [
        "--env-file=/absolute/path/to/searchapi-mcp/.env",
        "/absolute/path/to/searchapi-mcp/dist/index.js"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop doesn't inherit your shell's PATH. If node isn't found, use the absolute path from which node.

Development

cp .env.example .env   # add your key
npm test               # offline unit tests against recorded responses
npm run smoke          # live end-to-end check over MCP (~10 searches)

• src/searchapi.ts: the HTTP client and the trimming rules for each engine.

• src/index.ts: the MCP tool definitions.

• test/fixtures/: real SearchApi responses, cut down to a few items each.

• scripts/smoke.mjs: a minimal MCP client that calls every tool against the live API.

Notes

• Google Jobs coverage: Google Jobs isn't available in every country. In testing it returned listings for the US, UK and Canada but none for Finland, Sweden or Germany. SearchApi rejects gl=fi for this engine outright.

• The API key is sent in the Authorization header, never in the URL, so it can't end up in error messages or logs.

• Server logs go to stderr so they never corrupt the stdio JSON-RPC channel.

• This is an independent open-source wrapper of SearchApi's public API, not an official SearchApi product.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.