Brave Search

· #382 most-used

Privacy-first search that your agent actually trusts

MarketingAnalyticsDeveloperAIAutomation

Brave Search is an independent search engine with its own index — no Google or Bing dependency, no ad-targeting profiles, no bias toward paid results. Connect it to Actionist and your agents can run web, news, image, video, local, and discussion searches; fetch real-time autocomplete suggestions; pull AI-summarised answers with citations; and monitor trending queries — all through a single API key. The result is research that's fast, unfiltered, and privacy-preserving at every step of your workflow.

Try Brave Search with Actionist Visit Brave Search

Average time saved

10 hours

per person · per month

≈ 1 workdays back

Eliminates manual work. Eliminates manual tab-switching for prospect research, competitive monitoring, support lookups, and trend tracking — searches run inline in the workflow and results land exactly where the team needs them.

Schedule

What your Brave Search agent runs on autopilot

A week of scheduled jobs your Actionist agent will execute on your behalf.

28Scheduled jobs

7Agents at work

24/7Always on

Agents

Wed–Fri

Wed

Thu

Fri

10a

11a

12p

Multi-app workflows

Brave Search × every other app you use

End-to-end automations that span multiple apps — each one a real business outcome.

6Workflows

9Apps spanned

~85 hrsSaved / week

6Personas served

For customer success

Featured4 apps

Support ticket auto-researched in 30 seconds

When a customer emails a question the agent hasn't seen before, it runs a Brave web search and FAQ lookup on the subject line, surfaces the three most relevant help articles and community threads, and posts the findings to Slack before the support rep has opened the ticket. The rep replies with cited answers — no tab switching, no searching, no guessing. Response time drops from 8 minutes to under 90 seconds.

~60 hrs

Time saved for your team — every week, on autopilot

The flow

Trigger·When a new customer email arrives in Gmail asking a product question

Trigger

Step 1

Gmail

New email received (trigger)

read

Step 2

Brave Search

Web search on email subject line

write

Step 3

Brave Search

FAQ search for customer question

write

Step 4

Slack

Post research summary to #support channel

write

Step 5

Google Calendar

Schedule follow-up if ticket unresolved after 2h

Result

FAQ search for customer questionPost research summary to #support channelSchedule follow-up if ticket unresolved after 2h

The win

Saved per run

~2 hrs

Runs / week

~40×

Every ticket answered with cited sources

Driven byCustomer Support Agent

ROI

Savings

What your team gets back — two angles: what you stop doing manually, and what that's worth.

Without Actionist

What you do manually today

With Actionist

What your agent runs for you

Sales
18 min / week
Manual prospect Googling
Reps spend 15–20 minutes per prospect searching news, LinkedIn, and review sites before each call — across 5+ browser tabs.
Sales Agent
0 min
Agent-built prospect dossier
The agent runs web, news, and discussion searches on Brave and posts a sourced summary to Slack before the rep opens the CRM record.
Marketing
13 min / week
Trend research by hand
Marketers manually check Google Trends, Reddit, and news sites each week to find content angles — typically 30–45 minutes of scattered browsing.
Marketing Agent
0 min
Trending keyword brief, automated
The agent pulls Brave trending searches, matches them to content pillars, and generates a draft brief with FAQ answers and discussion quotes — ready before the editorial meeting.
Customer Support
18 min / week
Ticket research from scratch
Reps search documentation and community forums manually for each unfamiliar ticket — averaging 8 minutes per non-templated query.
Customer Support Agent
0 min
Instant cited answer on arrival
The agent runs Brave web and FAQ searches the moment a ticket lands, and posts sourced answers to #support before the rep has clicked in.
Human Resources
7 min / week
Comp benchmarking manually
HR manually searches salary databases and industry reports each quarter to benchmark roles — a slow, inconsistent process across multiple sites.
Human Resources Agent
0 min
Agent-sourced salary benchmarks
The agent queries Brave for current salary ranges for open roles and delivers a sourced benchmark summary to the recruiter's Notion page.
Finance
13 min / week
Market rate research
Finance manually searches vendor pricing benchmarks before contract renewals — no consistent process, results vary by who does the search.
Finance Agent
0 min
Live rate check on every renewal
The agent runs a Brave web and news search for market rates the moment a renewal is flagged, attaching a sourced summary to the vendor record.
Operations
25 min / week
Vendor discovery browsing
Ops manually searches Google for vendors, compares review sites, and compiles shortlists in a spreadsheet — taking 45+ minutes per category.
Operations Agent
0 min
Automated vendor shortlist
The agent runs Brave local and web searches for rated vendors in the requested category and writes a ranked comparison page to Notion in under two minutes.
Legal
6 min / week
Regulatory update monitoring
The Legal team manually checks government sites and legal news feeds weekly for new rulings — easy to miss updates that land between check cycles.
Legal Agent
0 min
Scheduled regulatory keyword alerts
The agent runs Brave searches for monitored legal terms on a schedule and fires a workflow the moment a new government page or ruling appears.

+ 100s of other Brave Search automations

Average monthly

10 hrs / person / month

Average monthly

10 hrs / person / month

Calculator

Calculate what your team saves

Team size

10 person

Hourly rate

$20 / hr

Hours saved / week

Hours saved / year

1,250

Annual ROI

$25,000

Based on Brave Search's typical team usage — the visible tasks plus a few other automations the agent runs: ~2.5 hrs / person / week of admin work automated.

Connect

How to plug Brave Search into Actionist

Pick the connection method that suits your environment.

The fastest path. Install the Brave Search MCP server in one click; your agent reaches Brave's full API surface — web, news, images, videos, local, summaries — through a single permissioned connection. No tokens to rotate, no rate-limit plumbing to build.

Open the Apps tab

Find Brave Search in the Apps library and click Connect. MCP is selected by default.

Get your Brave Search API key

Visit brave.com/search/api, sign up for the free tier (2,000 queries/month) or a paid plan, and copy the API key from your dashboard.

Test the connection

Actionist runs a read-only web search to verify the handshake. A green tick means your agent can reach Brave's full API. You're ready.

Actions

15 action your agent can call

Read and write operations available to your Actionist agent.

Triggers

6 events your agent can react to

Events your agent watches for, and the actions it kicks off in response.

Skills

Skills that pair with Brave Search

Reusable agent skills that work well alongside this app.

Brave Search

Runs web searches and extracts page content via the Brave Search API — no browser required, no tracking headers sent.

Brave Api Search

Wraps the full Brave Search API surface including autosuggest and AI answers, optimised for structured workflow use.

CN Web Search

Aggregates 17 search engines for Chinese-language web research without requiring an API key.

MCP servers

MCP servers that work with Brave Search

Connect Actionist to MCP servers built for or around this app.

arjunkmrm-brave-search-mcp-server

Official

MCP server exposing Brave Search web, image, video, news, and local search with freshness and safesearch controls.

brave

Official

Official Brave MCP server — connects your agent to the full Brave Search API surface with a single API key.

brave/brave-search-mcp-server

Official

Brave's own open-source MCP server: web results, images, videos, rich results, and AI summaries via the official API.

FAQs

Questions about Brave Search + Actionist

What makes Brave Search different from using a Google or Bing API in my workflows?

Brave Search operates its own independent index — no data is passed to Google or Bing, and results aren't shaped by ad-targeting profiles or commercial agreements. Your agent gets search results based purely on relevance signals, not on what advertisers paid to surface. This matters for compliance-sensitive research and for workflows where unbiased sourcing is important.

How do I connect Brave Search to Actionist?

Go to brave.com/search/api and sign up for an API key — the free tier covers 2,000 queries per month. Paste the key into the API Token connection method in Actionist, or use the MCP path which handles the key configuration for you. Run Test connection to confirm the handshake before activating any workflows.

Which endpoints does the agent have access to once connected?

Once connected, your agent can call web search, news search, image search, video search, local (POI) search, discussion forum search, FAQ search, autocomplete suggestions, spellcheck, AI-summarised answers, and trending searches. All endpoints use the same API key — there are no per-endpoint subscriptions.

What are the rate limits and query quotas?

The free plan allows 2,000 queries per month across all endpoints. Paid plans start at $3/month for 20,000 queries with higher limits. Actionist tracks quota usage and can trigger a workflow when you approach your limit (see the Quota threshold reached trigger). If you run high-volume workflows, set up the quota alert so the agent pauses non-critical searches before you hit the ceiling.

Can I use Brave Goggles to bias results toward specific domains?

Yes. Goggles are custom ranking rulesets you define at brave.com/search/api — you can boost government sites, suppress SEO-farm domains, or create a 'docs only' mode for developer lookups. Pass the Goggle URL as a parameter in the Goggles re-ranked search action. Each workflow can reference a different Goggle, so your legal research and your marketing research use separate ranking rules.

How do I avoid running duplicate searches in scheduled workflows?

Use the New result in saved query trigger, which only fires when a URL appears that wasn't in the previous run — not every time the query returns results. For keyword alert workflows, store the previous result set in a Google Sheet or Airtable record and compare before acting. This prevents duplicate Slack messages and repeated Notion entries from the same content.

Does the AI summariser always return a result?

Not always — the summariser only returns an answer when Brave's index has enough high-quality sources to synthesise one. For niche technical queries or very recent events, it may return no summary. Build your workflow to handle empty summary responses gracefully: fall back to the top 3 web search results as the answer source rather than treating a missing summary as a failure.

Can I disconnect Brave Search and reconnect with a different API key?

Yes. Go to Apps → Brave Search → Connection settings, click Disconnect, then reconnect with the new key. Existing workflows will pause until reconnection succeeds — Actionist won't silently swap in the old key. After reconnecting, run Test connection to confirm the new key is active before re-enabling any paused workflows.