tavily-search

tavily-search is a skill for Claude Code from LichAmnesia/lich-skills. It costs 42 tokens per session (1,124 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A tool for searching the live web and extracting readable article content through the Tavily service. It can return source links and optional full pages as Markdown.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to research current news, documentation, prices, and facts, or to retrieve the readable text of a known web page. It requires a Tavily API key.
Why use it?
It helps when built-in search is unavailable or limited, or when an answer needs current information and sources. It is not intended for logging in or clicking through interactive pages.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions Codex.

Part of the lich-skills plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to research current news, documentation, prices, and facts, or to retrieve the readable text of a known web page. It requires a Tavily API key.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/lichamnesia/lich-skills/tavily-search
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add LichAmnesia/lich-skills --skill tavily-search
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/LichAmnesia/lich-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install lich-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for tavily-search

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lichamnesia/lich-skills/tavily-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/lichamnesia/lich-skills/tavily-search)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lichamnesia/lich-skills/tavily-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lichamnesia/lich-skills/tavily-search/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for tavily-search

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/lichamnesia/lich-skills/tavily-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/lichamnesia/lich-skills/tavily-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,124 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 2 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00042 $0.01124
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00562
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00225
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00112

Measured 11d ago against content hash 418dc90fe033, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

tavily-search scanned grade C with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/search.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Downloads and executes remote codehighSupply chain

curl | sh runs whatever the server returns today, which is not necessarily what it returned when this was reviewed.

command -v uv || curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

command -v uv || curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
skills/tavily-search/SKILL.md · 144 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 144 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Headless web search and content extraction using Tavily. Built for LLM agents — returns clean, summarised results with optional raw article bodies. No browser required.

When to use

  • You need up-to-date web information (news, docs, pricing, facts)
  • You want cited sources with URLs for a research/writing task
  • You need the full readable body of a URL as markdown
  • Brave/Google search is not available or rate-limited

When NOT to use

  • You already have the page in your context
  • The answer is static and likely in the model's training data
  • You need to interact with a page (login, click) — use a browser MCP instead

Setup

  1. Get a free API key: https://app.tavily.com (1000 free searches/month)

  2. Export it:

    export TAVILY_API_KEY="tvly-YOUR_KEY_HERE"
    

    Add to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc for persistence. Never commit the key.

  3. First run will auto-install dependencies via uv:

    command -v uv || curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
    
# Basic search — 5 results, summarised answer
uv run ~/.claude/skills/lich-skills/skills/tavily-search/scripts/search.py "your query"

# More results
uv run .../search.py "your query" --max-results 10

# Include full article bodies (slower, more tokens)
uv run .../search.py "your query" --raw-content

# Deeper search with higher recall
uv run .../search.py "your query" --depth advanced

# News-only, last 7 days
uv run .../search.py "your query" --topic news --days 7

# Output as JSON
uv run .../search.py "your query" --json

Flags

Flag Default Purpose
--max-results N 5 Number of results to return (1–20)
--depth {basic,advanced} basic advanced = slower, higher quality
--topic {general,news} general News mode adds recency filtering
--days N With --topic news, restrict to last N days
--raw-content off Include full article body as markdown
--include-domains a,b Restrict to comma-separated domains
--exclude-domains a,b Exclude comma-separated domains
--json off Machine-readable JSON output

Read the full file on GitHub · 144 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 144 lines · 42 tokens per session scan C 418dc90fe033

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tavily-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository LichAmnesia/lich-skills (233 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 1,124 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 2 findings (downloads and executes remote code, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.