OpenClaw Brave Search Skill: Best for Research and SEO

Real-time web search is one of the most impactful capabilities you can give an AI agent. The OpenClaw Brave Search skill connects your agent to Brave's independent search index — no Google, no tracking, just fast and accurate results. This guide covers installation, configuration, and the workflows where it shines.

Why Brave Search for OpenClaw?

Brave Search has a fully independent index (not a Google or Bing proxy), a generous free API tier, and strong privacy defaults. For agent use:

• No personalisation bias — every query returns consistent results
• API access without the restrictive quotas of competing search providers
• Good coverage of technical content, developer documentation, and recent news

Setup

Get a Brave Search API Key

1. Go to api.search.brave.com
2. Create a free account (2,000 queries/month free)
3. Generate an API key from the dashboard

Install the Skill

/skills install brave-search
# Paste your Brave API key when prompted

Use Cases

Research briefings: "Search for the latest news about OpenClaw security vulnerabilities and summarise the findings."

Fact verification: "Search for the current price of Claude API tokens and compare to what I'm paying."

Competitive research: "Find recent reviews and comparisons of managed OpenClaw hosting providers."

Content research: "Search for the top-ranked articles about [topic] and list their main points so I can differentiate my content."

Staying current: "What happened in the AI agent space this week?"

Combining Brave Search with Other Skills

The Brave Search skill becomes more powerful when combined with:

+ SEO Content Writer: Research a keyword SERP before drafting content that stands out from existing results.

+ GitHub skill: Search for open-source solutions before writing new code.

+ Notion skill: Research a topic and automatically save a summary to your knowledge base.

+ Email skill: Research a company or person before drafting an outreach email.

Limitations

The free tier (2,000 queries/month) is sufficient for personal use but may run short for intensive research agents. The $3/month tier gives 20,000 queries. Brave Search has slightly lower coverage for very niche technical documentation compared to Google, but is improving rapidly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Brave Search return AI-generated answers?

Yes, Brave has its own AI summary layer (Brave Leo). The OpenClaw skill queries the raw search API, which returns standard organic results rather than AI-generated summaries.

Can I use Google Search instead?

The Google Custom Search API is more expensive and has stricter quotas. For most agent research tasks, Brave Search is the better default.