Brave Search API Key: How to Get One and Use It (2026)

A Brave Search API key is a credential you create in the Brave API dashboard that lets apps, agents, and MCP servers query Brave's independent search index. To get one, register at api-dashboard.search.brave.com/register, subscribe to the Search plan (priced at $5.00 per 1,000 requests with $5 in free credits every month), then create a key in the "API keys" section of the dashboard.

How do you get a Brave Search API key?

Getting a Brave Search API key takes three steps in the Brave API dashboard: register an account, subscribe to a plan, and create a key. The whole flow takes about five minutes.

1. Register. Create an account at api-dashboard.search.brave.com/register. The Brave Search API page links to the same dashboard via its "Sign up" and "Get started" buttons.
2. Add a card and pick the Search plan. Under "Available plans", subscribe to the Search plan. You can confirm the subscription later under the "My subscriptions" tab. Brave requires a credit card even if you only ever use the free monthly credits. Brave's FAQ states: "The credit card requirement serves as an anti-fraud measure to protect Brave from bad actors. For free plans, the card is only used to confirm your identity and will not be charged."
3. Create the key. Open the "API keys" section, create a new key, and store it somewhere safe. Brave's own setup guide tells you to "note your API key for later use, and save your key in a safe place." Treat it like any other secret: environment variable or secrets manager, never committed to a repo.

One security note that applies to every key in this post: if a Brave key ever lands in a chat log, a screenshot, or a public repo, revoke it in the dashboard and create a new one. Keys are cheap to rotate and expensive to leak.

Brave Search API pricing in 2026

As of July 2026, the Brave Search API uses credit-based billing: the core Search plan costs $5.00 per 1,000 requests, and every account gets $5.00 in free credits each month, which works out to roughly 1,000 free Search queries. Brave retired the older Free (2,000 queries/month), Base, and Pro tiers in early 2026 when it relaunched the API for AI workloads, so older guides quoting those plans are out of date.

Numbers above come from the official Brave Search API page and the pricing documentation. The $5 monthly credit applies across plans, so light personal-agent usage can stay effectively free.

Test your key with one curl command

The fastest way to confirm a Brave API key works is a single request to the web search endpoint with the X-Subscription-Token header. The endpoint is https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search, documented in the Brave web search docs.

curl "https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search?q=openclaw" \
  -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -H "X-Subscription-Token: YOUR_API_KEY"

A JSON payload with a web.results array means the key is live. A 401 or 403 usually means the key was pasted wrong or the subscription is not active under "My subscriptions".

Use the key with OpenClaw

OpenClaw documents Brave as its first-choice web search provider: set the BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable in the Gateway environment and the built-in web_search tool picks it up automatically. The OpenClaw Brave Search docs list Brave first in the provider auto-detection order (order 10), read from "BRAVE_API_KEY or plugins.entries.brave.config.webSearch.apiKey", ahead of other providers.

If you prefer explicit config over environment variables, the documented location is the Brave plugin entry:

{
  "plugins": {
    "entries": {
      "brave": {
        "config": {
          "webSearch": {
            "apiKey": "YOUR_API_KEY",
            "mode": "web"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The older tools.web.search.apiKey path still appears in some tutorials but is the legacy location; the plugin entry above is the current documented home. OpenClaw's docs also note it uses the Brave Search plan, so the $5 monthly credit covers roughly 1,000 agent searches before billing starts.

Brave also publishes its own OpenClaw guide built around a separate bx CLI and an installable skill. That path works, but it uses a different variable name (BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY). For the built-in web_search tool, follow OpenClaw's own docs and use BRAVE_API_KEY.

Use the key with the Brave Search MCP server

Brave maintains an official MCP server, brave/brave-search-mcp-server, that exposes eight tools to any MCP client: brave_web_search, brave_local_search, brave_video_search, brave_image_search, brave_news_search, brave_summarizer, brave_place_search, and brave_llm_context. It reads the same BRAVE_API_KEY environment variable and defaults to STDIO transport.

In Claude Code, one command wires it up:

claude mcp add brave-search \
  --env BRAVE_API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY \
  -- npx -y @brave/brave-search-mcp-server --transport stdio

We track the official server and the popular community alternatives in our MCP directory: brave/brave-search-mcp-server (official), mikechao/brave-search-mcp (adds image, news, and video search in one community package), and arjunkmrm/brave-search-mcp-server. Note that the original reference implementation in the modelcontextprotocol servers repo was archived on May 29, 2025, so use Brave's official package instead of @modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search.

For a broader picture of how MCP servers fit into an agent stack, see our OpenClaw MCP servers guide and Claude Code MCP setup guide.

Using Brave Search for agent research workflows

A Brave API key gives your agent fresh retrieval; it does not give you a working research-to-revenue workflow on its own. Brave handles the "find current information" step. Turning that into qualified leads, follow-ups, or briefings is workflow design on top of search.

The practical split looks like this: use Brave for grounded, current web data (prospect news, market scans, monitoring), keep your main model for reasoning and synthesis, and let OpenClaw orchestrate the sequence. If your real bottleneck is sales motion rather than search access, a ready-made workflow like Scout (research plus qualification and follow-up) or the lighter Lead Scorer Skill (ICP-based scoring for existing lead lists) removes more friction than another retrieval integration.

Cost discipline follows the same logic: narrow queries, bounded result counts, and search only where freshness matters. At $5.00 per 1,000 requests the math is easy to plan, but an agent that searches the web for every trivial task will still burn credits solving the wrong problem.

Limitations and Tradeoffs

The Brave Search API no longer has a card-free tier: you must enter a credit card even for the $5 monthly credit, which is a real blocker for some users. If your workflow rarely needs current web data, or you are content with a model vendor's built-in browsing, a paid search API adds a second bill and another moving part without solving a real problem. And Brave's index, while independent, is smaller than Google's; for niche or very local queries you may want to compare result quality before committing production workflows to it.

Related Guides

• OpenClaw Codex Web Search Guide
• OpenClaw MCP Servers Explained
• Claude Code MCP: How to Add and Use MCP Servers
• How to Run OpenClaw Safely: Security Hardening Guide

Sources

• Brave Search API official page
• Brave Search API pricing documentation
• OpenClaw Brave Search docs
• Official Brave Search MCP server (GitHub)
• Brave's OpenClaw integration guide