MCP server Reference
Fetch
Reference server that fetches web pages and converts HTML to markdown for a model to read.
Home / Use cases / Read the live web
Use case · Club note
Read the live web
A reading order for search and page fetch: start with the smallest tool that can see the public web, and widen only when the task needs it.
- Type
- Use case
- Author
- AgentSkillClub
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Status
- Club note
- Listed
- 2026-11-07
Before you use it. A club note is a reading order, not a product. Follow the license and the caution on each tool it links to.
Original AgentSkillClub write-up, released CC0-1.0. It is not an upstream project. Every tool it names is a separate open-source item in this catalog and keeps its own license.
When this is the job
Someone asks an agent to open a URL, search, or come back with sources. Pick one server. Do not turn on every search tool in the client.
A reasonable order
- Fetch is the reference server that turns a URL into markdown. Its README warns that it can also reach local and internal addresses. Use it on public URLs, in a lab, until you have decided that warning is acceptable.
- Brave Search, Exa, Jina, and Firecrawl are company servers for search and reading. Each README names an API key or a hosted URL. Brave replaced the old archived example in the reference-servers repo.
- Stop when you have the page. A second crawler rarely makes the answer better.
What not to add in the same step
Do not also mount the filesystem server unless a person has named the directories. Reading the web and writing the disk are different permissions.
Tools in this note
MCP server
Brave Search
Official Brave Search MCP server for web, local, image, video, news, and related search.
MCP server
Exa
Official Exa MCP server for web search and crawling.
MCP server
Jina
Official Jina remote MCP server for the Reader, Search, Embeddings, and Reranker APIs.
MCP server
Firecrawl
Official Firecrawl MCP server for search, scrape, and page interaction, returned as context for an agent.
Questions
What license covers Read the live web?
The catalog records this as CC0-1.0. Original AgentSkillClub write-up, released CC0-1.0. It is not an upstream project. Every tool it names is a separate open-source item in this catalog and keeps its own license.
Is a raw file mirrored here?
The note itself is original text on this site, released CC0. It does not mirror the tools it mentions.
What should I check first?
A club note is a reading order, not a product. Follow the license and the caution on each tool it links to.