Tavily MCP is a Model Context Protocol server that gives LLM clients and coding assistants live web access through Tavily's search API. It exposes four tools: tavily-search for real-time web search, tavily-extract for pulling structured data out of specific web pages, tavily-map for building a structured map of a website, and tavily-crawl for systematically traversing a site. It is aimed at developers who want to connect an assistant such as Claude, Cursor, or Cline to current web information rather than relying on the model's training data alone.
The server can be used either as a hosted remote endpoint (mcp.tavily.com) or run locally over npx, and works with MCP-compatible clients. A Tavily API key is required; authentication can be supplied as a URL query parameter, an Authorization header, or via an OAuth flow that lets clients connect without embedding the key. When using OAuth, the key named mcpauthdefault (personal taking priority over team) selects which account key the requests draw from.
Default behavior for the search tool can be preset through a DEFAULTPARAMETERS value (a JSON object controlling options like image inclusion, search depth, and result count), so those options need not be repeated per request. An optional TAVILYHUMAN_ID can be set to identify the end user behind requests for per-user analytics; Tavily hashes this value server-side rather than storing it raw.