How to Install Tavily MCP in OpenAI Agents SDK
AI-optimised web search built for agents — grounded, real-time answers with source citations
What Tavily MCP does
Tavily is the search API built specifically for AI agents — returning grounded, factual results optimised for LLM consumption rather than raw HTML. Trusted by LangChain, AutoGPT, and thousands of agent builders. Features: - Real-time web search returning clean, structured results - Search depth control: basic (fast) or advanced (comprehensive) - Domain filtering — restrict or exclude specific sources - News-focused search mode for recent events - Raw content extraction from any URL - Source citation with titles, URLs, and publication dates - AI-optimised output — no noise, just the relevant content - Supports up to 20 results per query with content previews Why Tavily over Brave Search? - Purpose-built for AI agents, not humans - Returns content already parsed for LLM consumption - Better filtering and relevancy for factual queries - Trusted by the LangChain and LlamaIndex ecosystems Free tier: 1,000 searches/month.
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", "tavily-mcp"],
env={
"TAVILY_API_KEY": "tvly-...",
},
)
agent = Agent(
name="My Agent",
model="gpt-4o",
mcp_servers=[mcp_server],
)Install in other clients
For maintainers
If you maintain Tavily MCP, add this badge to your README to show it's verified on CuratedMCP:
[](https://curatedmcp.com/marketplace/tavily-mcp)