The fallback is a sensible default for a person, who would rather see something than nothing. For an agent it is a behaviour to be aware of, because 'no local businesses matched' and 'here are some web pages' are different answers to the same question, and only one of them tells you the place does not exist. Beyond that this is a straightforward two-tool wrapper over Brave's API, and freshness control is the parameter that earns its keep — a search engine tool without it will confidently return three-year-old pages for a question about this week.
A Brave Search client with two tools: general web search with pagination and freshness controls, and local search for businesses and places.
- brave_web_search covers general queries, news and articles, with pagination, freshness and safety filtering.
- brave_local_search finds businesses, restaurants and services with their details, and falls back to web search automatically when a local query returns nothing — so an unmatched query returns results rather than an empty list.
BRAVE_API_KEY, from Brave's own developer programme.
One command plus a key — npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search, then supply credentials