Web Search | GitHub Agentic Workflows
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Web Search

Use the Tavily Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to add web search to workflows. Alternatives such as Exa, SerpAPI, and Brave Search also exist, but this page covers Tavily.

Copilot’s native web_search tool is unavailable in offline BYOK mode, including SDK mode. gh aw compile rejects tools.web-search for Copilot; configure an MCP server as shown below instead.

Section titled “Tavily Search”

Tavily provides structured JSON search results, news search, and an MCP server at @tavily/mcp.

---
on: issues


engine: copilot


mcp-servers:
  tavily:
    command: npx
    args: ["-y", "@tavily/mcp"]
    env:
      TAVILY_API_KEY: "${{ secrets.TAVILY_API_KEY }}"
    allowed: ["search", "search_news"]
---


# Search and Respond


Search the web for information about: ${{ github.event.issue.title }}


Use the tavily search tool to find recent information.

Setup

Section titled “Setup”

Sign up at tavily.com to get an API key, then add it as a repository secret:

Terminal window
gh aw secrets set TAVILY_API_KEY --value "<your-api-key>"

Review the Tavily Terms of Service, then test the workflow with gh aw mcp inspect <workflow>.

Tool Discovery

Section titled “Tool Discovery”

Inspect the workflow to see which Tavily tools are available:

Terminal window
# Inspect the MCP server in your workflow
gh aw mcp inspect my-workflow --server tavily


# List tools with details
gh aw mcp list-tools tavily my-workflow --verbose

Network Permissions

Section titled “Network Permissions”

Agentic workflows require explicit network permissions for MCP servers:

network:
  allowed:
    - defaults
    - "*.tavily.com"

Learn More

Section titled “Learn More”