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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Brave Search API + MCP vs Serper

Brave Search API + MCP has a score of 68.1 (B) against Serper's 24.3 (F). Both do web search. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 84 points.

Brave Search API + MCPBrave · HTTP API B68.1/100#132 of 452 SerperSerper · HTTP API F24.3/100#446 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Brave Search API + MCP for

  • reliability (+25)
  • schema & documentation (+66)
  • agent ergonomics (+37)
  • security & auth (+38)
  • payments & pricing (+30)
  • maintenance & community (+84)
  • transparency & trust (+49)

Pick Serper for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBrave Search API + MCPSerperEdge
Reliability16%205530Brave Search API + MCP +25
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.2726Brave Search API + MCP +66
Agent ergonomics13%16.27235Brave Search API + MCP +37
Security & auth14%17.55820Brave Search API + MCP +38
Payments & pricing10%12.57040Brave Search API + MCP +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8873Brave Search API + MCP +84
Transparency & trust7%8.88233Brave Search API + MCP +49
Negative events≤1500
Total68.1 · B24.3 · F

Facts side by side

FactBrave Search API + MCPSerper
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorBraveSerper
Hosted endpointhttps://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/searchhttps://google.serper.dev/search
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, HTTPHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402payer tooling onlyno
LicenceMITnone
Tools exposed8none
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
MCP registryio.github.brave/brave-search-mcp-servernot listed
Last release2026-09-17none
Popularity1.4k stars, 22k npm/wknone
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)2.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Brave Search API + MCP

x402 proxy sells web, LLM Context, news, video, image and local search at $0.005 a call, and a failed search isn't charged. The status page marks the Search API "not monitored" and shows no incident history.

Serper

$0.30 to $1.00 per 1,000 queries on prepaid packs, with no subscription. No status page, SLA or incident history.

Before you call either

Brave Search API + MCP

  1. Call /res/v1/llm/context when you need page text rather than links. It saves a separate fetch
  2. Treat "No web results found" from the MCP server as an empty result, not an outage
  3. On 429, wait for X-RateLimit-Reset seconds. There's no Retry-After header
  4. Skip brave_summarizer. The Summarizer is deprecated and the x402 proxy doesn't sell it
  5. Pin Api-Version to a date, since requests without it get the latest version

Serper

  1. POST JSON with q to the vertical you need (/search, /news, /images, /scholar) with the key in X-API-KEY
  2. Set gl and hl, since Google results vary by country and language
  3. Pair it with a fetcher. Serper returns links and snippets, not page text
  4. Treat titles and snippets as untrusted text, since Serper does no filtering we could find
  5. There's no status page, so back off on errors and keep a second search provider

Other comparisons with Brave Search API + MCP or Serper

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