How to Install Perplexity MCP in OpenAI Agents SDK
AI-powered search with citations — real-time web answers grounded in up-to-date sources
What Perplexity MCP does
Perplexity MCP brings the power of Perplexity's AI search engine directly into your AI agent. Get real-time, citation-backed answers from the web without the noise of raw search results. Features: - Search with real-time web grounding - Academic mode for research papers and scholarly sources - Pro search for deeper, multi-step reasoning - Source citations with direct URLs - Follow-up question support - Image search capabilities - News-focused search with recency filtering - Related questions and topic expansion Why Perplexity over Brave/Tavily? Perplexity doesn't just return search results — it synthesises them into coherent answers with citations. It's the difference between a list of links and a researched answer. For complex questions requiring synthesis across multiple sources, Perplexity consistently outperforms raw search APIs. Free tier: 5 requests/day. Pro plans from $20/month for unlimited searches.
Installation steps
- 1Install: pip install openai-agents
- 2Copy the snippet below into your agent code
- 3Replace placeholder env values with your real keys
- 4Pass mcp_servers=[mcp_server] to your Agent()
Python snippet
from agents import Agent
from agents.mcp import MCPServerStdio
mcp_server = MCPServerStdio(
command="npx",
args=["-y", "@perplexity/mcp"],
env={
"PERPLEXITY_API_KEY": "pplx-...",
},
)
agent = Agent(
name="My Agent",
model="gpt-4o",
mcp_servers=[mcp_server],
)Install in other clients
For maintainers
If you maintain Perplexity MCP, add this badge to your README to show it's verified on CuratedMCP:
[](https://curatedmcp.com/marketplace/perplexity-mcp)
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