octen-mcp

MCP server for Octen. Plug it into Claude, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, or any MCP client to give your agent live web search and URL extraction.

Core capabilities:

• search / news_search: search the live web with domain, text, language, and time filters.
• broad_search: decompose a query into multiple sub-queries, search them concurrently, and return results grouped per sub-query for broad coverage.
• extract: turn one or more URLs into clean, LLM-ready content.
• image_search (In Beta — contact us for beta access): search the web for images by text query, by a reference image URL, or by base64 image data — exactly one of the three.
• video_search (In Beta — contact us for beta access): search the web for videos by text query.

What makes Octen useful for agents is that extract returns more than page text. Each successful result also includes:

• category: what the page is about
• page_structure: what kind of page it is
• highlights: ranked snippets when you pass a query

That lets an agent skip login walls, nav pages, and off-topic URLs before spending tokens on the full body.

Why Octen MCP

Fast

Web search averages 62ms. Fast enough for multi-step MCP workflows.

Accurate

Powered by SOTA text and VL embedding models. Better sources, fewer hallucinations.

Fresh

Live web data with minute-level updates. Useful for news, prices, and fast-moving pages.

Efficient

Clean highlights, optional full_content, and page labels keep model context relevant.

Quick start

You need an OCTEN_API_KEY from octen.ai.

Two ways to connect. Both serve the same six tools.

Node compatibility (local only): 0.4.2 and later run on every supported Node (>= 18.17), including Node 26+. Versions 0.4.1 and below fail every call on hosts whose embedded undici is v8+ (Node 26 and later) with Network error … code=UND_ERR_INVALID_ARG cause=invalid onError method — if you see that error, upgrade the package (or run on Node <= 24).

Connect to the hosted endpoint

Passing your key

Three ways, tried in this order. Prefer a header — a key in a URL is exposed to proxy logs, browser history and Referer headers.

Or use OAuth and paste no key at all — see Signing in instead.

By client

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http octen https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp --header "x-api-key: your-key-here"

Cursor — ~/.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "octen": {
      "url": "https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "your-key-here" }
    }
  }
}

VS Code — .vscode/mcp.json (workspace) or the user config. Note servers, not mcpServers, and the explicit type:

{
  "servers": {
    "octen": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "your-key-here" }
    }
  }
}

Codex

codex mcp add octen --url https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp --header "x-api-key: your-key-here"

Windsurf — ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json. The key is serverUrl, not url:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "octen": {
      "serverUrl": "https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "your-key-here" }
    }
  }
}

Gemini CLI — ~/.gemini/settings.json. The key is httpUrl:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "octen": {
      "httpUrl": "https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "your-key-here" }
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop takes the URL directly — no config file, no bridge. In Settings → Connectors, click Add custom connector, name it Octen, and enter:

https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp

Leave the Advanced settings empty: the OAuth Client ID and Secret fields are for servers that cannot register a client on their own, and ours can. Claude will offer to sign you in, and an Octen key is issued to that connection when you approve.

The connector dialog has no field for request headers, so an API key goes in the URL instead:

https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp?octenApiKey=your-key-here

Signing in is the better of the two — a URL is not a secret-carrying medium, and the sign-in flow can be revoked from your account without editing anything on this side. Note also that Claude connects from Anthropic's servers rather than from your machine, so a self-hosted deployment has to be reachable from the public internet for this to work at all; a private one wants the bridge below.

Clients that only speak stdio (Zed, Warp, Raycast, Cline) reach a remote server through the mcp-remote bridge. Note there is no space after the colon in --header — the value is split on the first one:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "octen": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y", "mcp-remote",
        "https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp",
        "--header", "x-api-key:your-key-here"
      ]
    }
  }
}

If a client cannot pass a header at all and takes only a URL, put the key in the URL instead: https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp?octenApiKey=your-key-here.

Signing in instead

If the deployment is configured with an authorization server — the hosted one is — a request with no credential is answered 401 + WWW-Authenticate: Bearer resource_metadata="…". That is the signal MCP clients use to start an OAuth flow, so a client that supports OAuth will offer to sign you in rather than ask for a key.

To move a connection that already has a key onto OAuth, point it at https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp/oauth (or append ?login). That path issues the challenge even when a key is present, which is the only way to trigger the switch — with a key attached, the ordinary endpoint has no reason to.

Loading fewer tools

?tools=search,extract limits a connection to the tools you name, for both tools/list and tools/call:

https://mcp.octen.ai/mcp?tools=search,extract

Clients load every advertised tool's full schema into the model's context, so narrowing the set is a real saving when you only need one or two. An unknown name is refused with a 400 listing the valid ones, rather than a connection that quietly comes up short.

Run it locally instead

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "octen": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "octen-mcp"],
      "env": { "OCTEN_API_KEY": "your-key-here" }
    }
  }
}

Config file locations

• Claude Desktop: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json — only needed for a local (stdio) install; the hosted endpoint is added as a connector instead
• Cursor: ~/.cursor/mcp.json
• VS Code workspace: .vscode/mcp.json (use servers instead of mcpServers)
• Windsurf: ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json
• Gemini CLI: ~/.gemini/settings.json
• Cline / other clients: paste it into that client's MCP settings

Troubleshooting

401 on every call. No credential reached the server. Check the header name — x-api-key, or Authorization: Bearer — and, if you are using mcp-remote, that there is no space after the colon in --header.

The tools do not appear. Most clients read MCP config once at startup; restart the client after editing it. If the config uses the wrong key for your client (url vs serverUrl vs httpUrl), the server is never contacted at all — see the per-client sections above.

406 Not Acceptable. The request's Accept header must list both application/json and text/event-stream. Clients do this for you; hand-rolled curl probes usually do not, and the resulting 406 looks like an auth failure.

400 mentioning tools. A name in ?tools= is not one this deployment serves. The error lists the ones that are.

A tool errors with code=403 … beta access. image_search and video_search are in Beta and enabled per account; the message says how to request it.

Errors name what happened. A failed call reports which dependency failed and why — a timeout, a connection code, an expired token and by how long — plus Octen's own request_id where the API returned one. Quote that id in a support request; it is the one an engineer can look up.

Tools

Reference docs:

• Search: docs.octen.ai/api-reference/search
• Extract: docs.octen.ai/api-reference/extract

Parameters

Transcribed from the schemas each tool publishes — and those are enforced, so an out-of-contract value is refused before any call is made, with a message naming the field. The limits track the API reference; a test fails if the two drift apart.

image_search takes exactly one of query, image_url or image_data. Every tool also accepts timeout (seconds) — a client-side deadline, not sent to the API.

search

news_search

broad_search

extract

image_search

video_search

Keep the tools always on (optional)

In clients with MCP tool search enabled (the Claude Code default), tools are deferred — the model runs a ToolSearch step to load them on demand. If you'd rather have the Octen tools resident from the first turn (no discovery step), set alwaysLoad on the server in your .mcp.json (Claude Code v2.1.121+):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "octen": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "octen-mcp"],
      "env": { "OCTEN_API_KEY": "your-key-here" },
      "alwaysLoad": true
    }
  }
}

Each always-loaded tool uses context on every turn, and alwaysLoad blocks startup until the server connects (capped at the ~5s connect timeout), so reserve it for tools you hit constantly. To keep the cost down, mark just the highest-traffic tools — e.g. search and broad_search — with "anthropic/alwaysLoad": true in each tool's _meta, leaving the rest deferred.

Why agents like this

Most extract tools stop at "here is the page body." Octen helps one step earlier:

• Skip bad pages early: page_structure.primary == "No Main Content" tells the agent it hit a login wall, empty shell, or similar non-content page.
• Filter by topic early: category helps a pipeline ignore pages outside the target vertical before embedding or summarizing.
• Use less context: query returns highlights when the user wants a specific fact instead of the full page.

For the full decision tree and integration patterns, see docs/best-practices.md.

Example prompts

• Fetch octen.ai and summarize the main product features.
• Search for recent MCP news from the last week.
• Fetch these URLs and only summarize the ones whose category is Finance.
• Search site:docs.anthropic.com prompt caching and return only the relevant highlights.

Self-hosting the HTTP server

The hosted endpoint above runs this same code; you can run it yourself instead:

PORT=8080 npx -y -p octen-mcp octen-mcp-http   # or: octen-mcp-http after a global install

Endpoints: POST /mcp (stateless Streamable HTTP) and GET /healthz. Stateless by design — there is no session to lose, so scaling is a matter of running more copies behind a load balancer. Credentials travel per request and never come from the server's own environment: a request without one fails rather than quietly spending the host's key.

Authorization is off unless you configure it. Set both OCTEN_OAUTH_AUTHORIZATION_SERVER and OCTEN_MCP_RESOURCE and the server advertises RFC 9728 protected-resource metadata and answers uncredentialed requests with a 401 challenge. Leave them unset and it advertises nothing — an instance should never point clients at an authorization server it does not have — and a missing key surfaces at call time instead.

Argument validation. Each tool's declared inputSchema is enforced, not just advertised: types, ranges, string lengths, array sizes, enums, required parameters, and the property list itself. An out-of-contract call is refused with a message naming the field, before anything is sent to the API.

Sending an image as base64. image_search accepts image_data up to 5MB encoded, which travels inside the JSON-RPC body. OCTEN_MCP_MAX_BODY defaults to 6 MiB to make that work unconfigured; OCTEN_MCP_MAX_INFLIGHT_BODY (24 MiB) separately bounds what all in-flight bodies hold at once, since a per-request cap does nothing about many concurrent ones.

Environment variables

Remote HTTP form only

These are read only by octen-mcp-http; the stdio entry ignores them.

OAuth. Off unless both of the first two are set, so an instance never advertises an authorization server it does not have.

Setting these in Claude Desktop (and where the logs go)

MCP servers do not inherit your shell environment. Claude Desktop spawns them with HOME, LOGNAME, PATH, SHELL and USER — and nothing else except what you put in the server's env block. A proxy configured system-wide will not be picked up; it has to be named explicitly, alongside the API key:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "octen": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "octen-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "OCTEN_API_KEY": "your-key-here",
        "HTTPS_PROXY": "http://proxy.example:8080"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop after editing the config — it reads it at launch.

Server output lands in:

• macOS: ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp-server-octen.log
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\logs\mcp-server-octen.log

Everything the server writes to stderr, including the tracing below, goes there.

Diagnosing a slow or failing call

Add "OCTEN_MCP_DEBUG": "1" to the env block above while you are investigating, and take it out afterwards — the client appends this to a log file that is never rotated, so leaving it on grows that file for the life of the install.

With it on, every call is traced to stderr:

[octen-mcp 2026-08-14T04:36:36.219Z] call #1 received tool=search
[octen-mcp 2026-08-14T04:36:36.637Z] connect #1 established to api.octen.ai in 410ms peer=203.0.113.10:443 tls=TLSv1.3 alpn=http/1.1
[octen-mcp 2026-08-14T04:36:37.155Z] /search attempt=1 status=200 elapsed=935ms socket=new request_id=42cd56a5-…
[octen-mcp 2026-08-14T04:36:37.157Z] call #1 returning tool=search handler_total=938ms

Each field answers a specific question:

• call #N received timestamp — when the call reached this process. Subtract it from the time your MCP client issued the tool call: the difference is time spent entirely outside octen-mcp, in the host or in whatever relays between them. A client-side stopwatch alone cannot separate that from time we are responsible for.
• connect … established in Xms — a handshake happened, and what it cost. connect FAILED names the phase and error code instead.
• peer= / tls= / alpn= — which address the connection actually reached (the API hostname is anycast, so the hostname alone cannot tell you which edge), and the negotiated TLS version and protocol — a mismatch there otherwise presents as an unexplained slow or failed handshake.
• socket=new / socket=reused — whether this call paid for a handshake. This is the difference between "the service is slow" and "the connection was thrown away between calls".
• elapsed vs handler_total — time in the HTTP request vs time in the tool handler. A large gap means the cost is in request assembly or response formatting, not the network.
• request_id — in this trace only: the client-generated correlation id, stable across the retry, tying a call's attempts together. It never appears in user-facing error messages, deliberately: Octen support cannot look it up (the gateway does not record the header), and an id labelled request_id reads like one they could. Error messages carry only ids verified searchable on Octen's side — today that is exactly one: the server's own request_id from an API error envelope.

Failures name the cause rather than fetch failed:

Network error calling Octen Search: code=ECONNREFUSED cause=connect ECONNREFUSED 203.0.113.9:443
address=203.0.113.9:443 — could not establish a connection.
If this machine requires an HTTP proxy, set HTTPS_PROXY.

UND_ERR_CONNECT_TIMEOUT means the connection was never established, ECONNRESET means it was established and then torn down, and ENOTFOUND means DNS — three different problems with three different owners.

Request timeouts: search and the media tools default to 30s, broad_search to 120s (raisable to 300s), and extract to its per-URL budget plus headroom. The search tools accept a timeout parameter to override; extract's timeout is the server-side, per-URL fetch budget, so the client ceiling is derived from it rather than equal to it. The automatic retry draws down the same deadline as the first attempt, so the stated timeout bounds the whole call, retry included.

Local development

git clone https://github.com/Octen-Team/octen-mcp.git
cd octen-mcp
npm install
npm run build
OCTEN_API_KEY=<key> npm run inspect

More docs

• Best practices for agent integration: docs/best-practices.md
• Search API reference: docs.octen.ai/api-reference/search
• Extract API reference: docs.octen.ai/api-reference/extract

License

MIT © Octen