Tavily Search
Give your coding agent real-time web answers and cited sources without hand-rolling search API calls.
Overview
Tavily Search is an agent skill most often used in Idea (also Validate, Build, Launch) that runs Tavily’s search API and returns an AI-oriented answer with source links.
Install
npx skills add https://github.com/veithly/tavily-search --skill tavily-searchWhat is this skill?
- Bash wrapper posts to Tavily search with max_results 5 and include_answer
- Optional JSON output via --format json on the search script
- Prints synthesized answer block plus up to five titled source URLs
- Requires TAVILY_API_KEY; documents signup at tavily.com
- Designed for agent context: concise answer + link list for follow-up
- include_answer true in default POST body
Adoption & trust: 3.7k installs on skills.sh; 4 GitHub stars; 2/3 security scanners passed (skills.sh audits).
What problem does it solve?
Your agent keeps hallucinating or citing stale training data when you need current web facts, news, or documentation.
Who is it for?
Solo builders who want a one-command, API-key-based web search hook inside agent workflows.
Skip if: Teams that need deep crawl, paywalled content extraction, or offline-only research with no network calls.
When should I use this skill?
Searching the web for current information, news, facts, or any task requiring real-time data.
What do I get? / Deliverables
You get a concise Tavily answer plus up to five source URLs in the terminal, ready to paste into specs, prompts, or implementation notes.
- Terminal answer + source list
- Optional JSON search payload
Recommended Skills
Journey fit
Spans multiple journey phases - primary shelf plus alternate fits below.
Research and fact-finding are the canonical entry point for web search in the solo-builder journey, even though the same capability supports later phases. The skill is optimized for discovery queries—news, facts, and current information—before you lock product decisions.
Where it fits
Pull latest industry news before you commit to a niche.
Confirm current Tavily or third-party API docs while wiring features.
Check recent SERP-oriented articles when drafting distribution copy.
How it compares
Use as a lightweight skill integration instead of building custom curl-to-search plumbing or generic browser scraping for every task.
Common Questions / FAQ
Who is tavily-search for?
Indie and solo developers using AI coding agents who need fast, citation-friendly web lookups during research and implementation.
When should I use tavily-search?
Use it during Idea research for market facts, in Validate when checking competitors or pricing pages, in Build when verifying API behavior, and at Launch or Grow when you need current SEO or distribution references.
Is tavily-search safe to install?
It executes shell curl against api.tavily.com and reads TAVILY_API_KEY from your environment; review the Security Audits panel on this Prism page before trusting it in CI or shared machines.
SKILL.md
READMESKILL.md - Tavily Search
#!/bin/bash # Tavily Web Search QUERY="${1:-}" if [ -z "$QUERY" ]; then echo "Usage: search <query>" exit 1 fi API_KEY="${TAVILY_API_KEY:-}" if [ -z "$API_KEY" ]; then echo "Error: TAVILY_API_KEY not set" exit 1 fi echo "Searching: $QUERY" curl -s -X POST "https://api.tavily.com/search" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \ -d "{\"query\": \"$QUERY\", \"max_results\": 5, \"include_answer\": true}" | python3 -c " import sys, json d = json.load(sys.stdin) if 'answer' in d and d['answer']: print('\n📝 Answer:') print(d['answer']) print('\n🔗 Sources:') for r in d.get('results', [])[:5]: print(f\" - {r.get('title', 'No title')}\") print(f\" {r.get('url', '')}\") " --- name: tavily-search description: | Tavily AI search API - Optimized search for AI agents. Use when searching the web for current information, news, facts, or any task requiring real-time data. --- # Tavily Search Web search optimized for AI agents using Tavily API. ## Usage ```bash ./scripts/search "your search query" ``` ## Scripts | Script | Usage | |--------|-------| | `scripts/search <query>` | Search the web | | `scripts/search "latest AI news" --format json` | JSON output | ## Environment ```bash export TAVILY_API_KEY="your-api-key" ``` Get API key: https://tavily.com/ ## Example ```bash ./scripts/search "Claude AI latest features" # Returns: Search results optimized for AI context ```