What is brave-search?

A web-search and webpage-content extraction tool that uses the Brave Search API. It can return search results or include page content in Markdown.

Use it to search the web, retrieve page content, limit results, or filter searches by freshness; it requires a Brave Search API key.

It provides a command-line way to look up documentation, facts, and web pages without opening a browser.

brave-search — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by SawyerHood/middleman

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 SawyerHood/middleman --skill brave-search

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SawyerHood/middleman

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sawyerhood/middleman/brave-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sawyerhood/middleman/brave-search)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sawyerhood/middleman/brave-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sawyerhood/middleman/brave-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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sawyerhood/middleman/brave-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sawyerhood/middleman/brave-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 638 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00032	$0.00638
Opus 5.5	$0.00013	$0.00255
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00006	$0.00128
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00064

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 01fa24722e05, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

brave-search scanned grade A with 0 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 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (content.js, search.js), 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.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

apps/backend/src/swarm/skills/builtins/brave-search/SKILL.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Brave Search

Web search and content extraction using the official Brave Search API. No browser required.

Setup

Requires a Brave Search API account with a free subscription. A credit card is required to create the free subscription (you won't be charged).

Create an account at https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/register
Create a "Free AI" subscription
Create an API key for the subscription
Configure BRAVE_API_KEY in the app Settings → Environment Variables. (Fallback for standalone usage: export BRAVE_API_KEY in your shell.)
Dependencies are installed via the backend workspace package. If running this skill standalone, install once from this skill directory:
```
npm install
```

Search

middleman brave-search search "query"                         # Basic search (5 results)
middleman brave-search search "query" -n 10                   # More results (max 20)
middleman brave-search search "query" --content               # Include page content as markdown
middleman brave-search search "query" --freshness pw          # Results from last week
middleman brave-search search "query" --freshness 2024-01-01to2024-06-30  # Date range
middleman brave-search search "query" --country DE            # Results from Germany
middleman brave-search search "query" -n 3 --content          # Combined options

Options

-n <num> - Number of results (default: 5, max: 20)
--content - Fetch and include page content as markdown
--country <code> - Two-letter country code (default: US)
--freshness <period> - Filter by time:
- pd - Past day (24 hours)
- pw - Past week
- pm - Past month
- py - Past year
- YYYY-MM-DDtoYYYY-MM-DD - Custom date range

Extract Page Content

middleman brave-search content https://example.com/article

Fetches a URL and extracts readable content as markdown.

Output Format

--- Result 1 ---
Title: Page Title
Link: https://example.com/page
Age: 2 days ago
Snippet: Description from search results
Content: (if --content flag used)
  Markdown content extracted from the page...

--- Result 2 ---
...

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files 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.

2mo ago First seen · 83 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A 01fa24722e05

Subscribe to this mod's changes

brave-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository SawyerHood/middleman (185 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 638 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Claude Code Research agents ai-agents

brave-search next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
brave-searchSawyerHood/middleman	Skill	185	5mo ago	Apache-2.0	A	32	Claude Code, Codex
foundry-config-setupmicrosoft/agent-framework	Skill	15k	yesterday	MIT	A	65	Claude Code, Codex
rowboat-spacesrowboatlabs/rowboat	Skill	18k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	60	Claude Code, Codex
create-tech-designhumanlayer/humanlayer	Skill	13k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	16	Claude Code, Codex
deploy-docker-composeomnigent-ai/omnigent	Skill	11k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	84	Claude Code, Codex
haikuagno-agi/agno	Skill	43k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	0	Claude Code, Codex
azure-mgmt-botservice-dotnetmicrosoft/skills	Skill	3.2k	yesterday	MIT	A	78	Claude Code