Top OpenClaw Skills for AI Search and Web Discovery
Brave Search handles 68.5% of OpenClaw search traffic, but agents that rely on a single provider miss structured answers, multilingual coverage, and specialized indexes for academic papers, social media, and financial data. This guide maps the full search-and-research skills category, covering general-purpose providers, domain-specific discovery tools, and the persistence layer that turns one-off queries into reusable research.
Why Most OpenClaw Agents Underuse Search
Brave Search captures 68.5% of default search provider configurations among OpenClaw users, with Tavily at 18.2% and Perplexity at 8.4%. The remaining 4.9% splits across Grok, Gemini, and a handful of niche providers. Those numbers come from the Skywork analysis of environment variable usage across public OpenClaw deployments, and they tell a clear story: most agents run exactly one search provider.
That works fine for general web queries. It falls apart when you need an agent to search Twitter threads for customer sentiment, scan ArXiv for a new paper on transformer architectures, or pull structured financial data from SEC filings. The awesome-openclaw-skills registry catalogs 354 skills in the search-and-research category alone, covering everything from self-hosted metasearch to AI-powered social listening across 1.5 billion posts.
This guide covers the full landscape: six general-purpose search providers, five domain-specific discovery skills, and a framework for choosing the right combination for your agent's workload. Each entry includes free-tier details, practical strengths, and honest limitations.
How We Evaluated These Skills
Every skill in this guide was tested against five criteria.
Free-tier availability. Can a solo developer try it without a credit card? Skills with a usable free tier scored higher than those requiring upfront payment.
Result structure. Does the skill return raw snippets, structured JSON, or AI-synthesized answers? Structured output means fewer follow-up calls and lower token spend.
Setup friction. How many steps between installing the skill and getting results? One environment variable beats a Docker deployment.
Specialization depth. General search covers breadth. Domain-specific skills cover depth. We valued both, but penalized tools that claimed breadth they didn't deliver.
Maintenance burden. Self-hosted tools score well on cost but poorly on upkeep. We noted the tradeoff explicitly for each entry.
General-Purpose Search Providers
These six skills handle broad web search queries. Most agents should start with one of these, then add domain-specific skills as needed.
Brave Search
Brave is the official default search provider for OpenClaw, and for good reason. It maintains its own independent web index (not a wrapper around Google or Bing), respects privacy, and returns structured snippets with locale filtering and freshness controls.
Key strengths:
- Independent index means results differ meaningfully from Google
- Freshness filtering and date-range controls for time-sensitive queries
- ~1,000 queries per month on the free tier
Limitations:
- Returns snippets only, no full-page content extraction
- Agents often need a secondary fetch tool (like Firecrawl or web_fetch) for deeper reads
- Occasional latency spikes reported by community users
Best for: General-purpose search where privacy matters and you don't need full article extraction in a single call.
Tavily
Tavily is purpose-built for LLM agents. Unlike traditional search APIs that return titles and snippets, Tavily delivers structured JSON with automatic answer extraction and full article content. That means your agent can get a direct answer without a follow-up fetch.
Key strengths:
- Answer extraction built into every query response
- Full article content instead of truncated snippets
- Search depth control (basic vs. advanced) for balancing speed and thoroughness
Limitations:
- 1,000 queries per month on the free tier, same as Brave
- Advanced search mode is noticeably slower than basic
- $0.008 per search beyond the free tier adds up for high-volume agents
Best for: Research-heavy agents that need structured answers without chaining multiple API calls.
Perplexity
Perplexity operates in dual mode: it can return structured search results or AI-synthesized answers with citations. The standout feature is domain filtering, which lets you restrict results to up to 20 specific domains (such as .edu sites or specific documentation portals).
Key strengths:
- Domain allowlist and denylist cuts noise from SEO spam
- Token budgets up to 1,000,000 for deep research queries
- Citation URLs resolved in every response
Limitations:
- No generous free tier compared to Brave or Tavily
- Dual-mode configuration adds complexity for simple use cases
- 8.4% adoption means less community tooling and fewer examples
Best for: Technical research where restricting source domains is more important than raw speed.
Felo Search
Felo stands out for multilingual search. It natively supports Japanese, Chinese, and Korean alongside English, with AI-synthesized answers and inline citations. The one-call workflow (search + synthesis in a single request) reduces token consumption compared to search-then-fetch patterns.
Key strengths:
- Native CJK language support without translation layers
- AI-synthesized answers with source citations in one call
- Free during the current open-access period
Limitations:
- Requires a FELO_API_KEY, which means signing up for an additional service
- Smaller English-language index than Brave or Tavily
- Open-access pricing will eventually change
Best for: Agents working across languages, particularly those handling Japanese, Chinese, or Korean content alongside English.
Exa
Exa uses neural semantic search instead of keyword matching. When your agent asks "papers about attention mechanisms in vision transformers," Exa understands the conceptual query rather than just matching words. It supports multiple search modes (auto, neural, fast, deep, deep-reasoning, instant) and includes built-in highlights and summaries.
Key strengths:
- Semantic search that understands conceptual queries, not just keywords
- Single-call content extraction without a separate fetch step
- Strong coverage of developer and technical content (GitHub repos, docs, forums)
Limitations:
- Neural search costs more than keyword-based providers
- 100-result cap per query
- Freshness and date filters cannot be used simultaneously
Best for: Developer research and conceptual queries where keyword matching produces too much noise.
SearXNG (openclaw-free-web-search)
SearXNG is the zero-cost option. It's a self-hosted metasearch engine that queries multiple backends (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others) simultaneously. The openclaw-free-web-search skill wraps SearXNG with anti-bot protection via Scrapling and adds multi-source cross-validation.
Key strengths:
- Completely free with no API key and no query limits
- Aggregates results from multiple search engines in parallel
- No third-party data logging
Limitations:
- Requires Docker setup and ongoing server maintenance
- Result quality varies depending on which backends are available
- Slower than hosted providers due to multi-backend aggregation
Best for: Budget-conscious teams or privacy-sensitive deployments where you can invest in server maintenance.
Domain-Specific Discovery Skills
General search handles 80% of an agent's queries. The remaining 20% need specialized indexes that web search providers don't cover well. These five skills fill gaps that Brave, Tavily, and Perplexity leave open.
social-intelligence (XPOZ)
This skill indexes 1.5 billion posts across Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok. It provides full-text search with engagement metrics and author details, which means your agent can find relevant conversations instead of just web pages.
Use cases include brand sentiment monitoring, lead generation from live discussions, influencer identification, and competitive intelligence. The skill offers 5,000 free credits with no credit card required.
Best for: Agents that need to understand what people are saying right now, not what websites published last week.
arxiv-watcher
Searches and summarizes papers from ArXiv, the preprint server that publishes most ML and physics research before peer review. An agent running arxiv-watcher can monitor specific research areas and surface new papers matching a query.
Best for: Research teams tracking fast-moving fields where waiting for journal publication means falling behind.
finance-search-agent
A specialized skill for financial data retrieval. It pulls structured results from financial sources that general web search either buries or misses entirely. The ClawHub finance category contains over 311 skills, but finance-search-agent focuses specifically on search and discovery rather than trading or portfolio management.
Best for: Agents building financial research reports or monitoring market-moving information.
brw-ai-discoverability-audit
This skill flips the search paradigm. Instead of searching the web, it audits how AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) see your brand. It tests how different LLMs describe, recommend, and surface a given company or product, then provides actionable recommendations.
If your company is invisible to AI assistants, you're missing a growing channel of high-intent discovery. This skill helps identify and fix those gaps.
Best for: Marketing and SEO teams optimizing for AI-powered search visibility, not just traditional Google rankings.
web-search-pro
An agent-first web search and retrieval stack that works without any API key at all. It provides a real no-key baseline with explainable routing, so your agent can search the web from day one without signing up for anything. Beyond basic search, it supports extract, crawl, map, and research workflows.
Best for: Quick prototyping and agents that need a fallback search option with zero configuration.
Give your search agents a workspace that remembers
generous storage with automatic semantic indexing. Your agent searches, stores, and shares results from one workspace. No credit card, no vector database setup.
Picking the Right Combination
No single search skill covers every use case. Here's a practical framework for combining them.
Solo developer, getting started. Install Brave (already the default) and add Tavily if you need structured answers. That covers most general queries on a free tier.
Research-heavy agent. Pair Perplexity for domain-filtered technical queries with Exa for semantic developer content. Add arxiv-watcher if your agent handles academic research.
Multilingual deployment. Start with Felo Search for CJK languages and fall back to Brave for English-only queries.
Social listening agent. Use social-intelligence as the primary source and supplement with general web search for context around trending topics.
Zero-budget deployment. Run SearXNG on a small VPS and pair it with web-search-pro for a completely free stack. You'll spend time on maintenance instead of money on API calls.
OpenClaw auto-detects search providers by checking environment variables in this order: Brave, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Firecrawl, Tavily. You can override this by explicitly configuring which provider to use, but the default cascade means agents pick up whatever keys are available in the environment.
Turning Search Results into Persistent Research
Search skills retrieve information. They don't store it. An agent that runs a complex research query, synthesizes results across multiple providers, and then loses everything when the session ends is wasting tokens and time.
The missing piece is a persistence layer where search results become reusable artifacts. Local file storage works for single-developer setups, but breaks down when multiple agents need access to the same research or when results need to be shared with humans.
Fastio fits this gap as an intelligent workspace where agents store, index, and share research output. Files uploaded to a workspace are automatically indexed for semantic search when Intelligence Mode is enabled, which means your agent's search results become queryable without setting up a separate vector database. The MCP server provides 19 consolidated tools for workspace, storage, AI, and workflow operations.
S3 or Google Drive work for raw storage, but they lack the indexing and semantic search layer. Fastio's Business Trial includes 50 GB of storage, included credits, and 5 workspaces with no credit card required. That's enough for most research agent workflows.
The practical setup: your search skill retrieves data, your agent processes and synthesizes it, and Fastio stores the output in a workspace that both agents and humans can access. Ownership transfer lets an agent build the research collection and hand it off to a human collaborator when the work is done.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best search provider for OpenClaw?
Brave Search is the official default and handles most general web queries well with ~1,000 free queries per month. For agents that need structured answers with full article content, Tavily is the stronger choice. The best option depends on your specific use case: Perplexity for domain-filtered research, Felo for multilingual queries, and Exa for semantic developer content.
How do OpenClaw search skills work?
Search skills are lightweight HTTP tools that query search providers and return structured results (titles, URLs, snippets) to the agent. When the agent encounters a query requiring current information, it triggers the search skill, receives results, and can optionally use a secondary fetch tool to extract full page content. OpenClaw auto-detects available providers by checking environment variables in a specific hierarchy: Brave, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, Firecrawl, then Tavily.
Can OpenClaw search social media and academic papers?
Yes. The social-intelligence skill by XPOZ indexes over 1.5 billion posts across Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok with full-text search and engagement metrics. For academic papers, arxiv-watcher searches and summarizes preprints from ArXiv. Both install as standard OpenClaw skills and can run alongside general web search providers.
What is the difference between Brave and Tavily for OpenClaw?
Brave returns structured snippets from its own independent web index and focuses on privacy and broad web coverage. Tavily is built specifically for AI agents and returns structured JSON with automatic answer extraction and full article content. Brave is better for general discovery. Tavily is better when your agent needs a direct answer without chaining a separate page fetch.
Are there free OpenClaw search skills?
Several providers offer usable free tiers. Brave and Tavily each provide roughly 1,000 queries per month. SearXNG is completely free when self-hosted. web-search-pro works without any API key at all. Felo Search is free during its current open-access period. DuckDuckGo also works without an API key but is less reliable due to its unofficial scraping approach.
How do I store search results from OpenClaw agents?
Search skills retrieve data but don't persist it. For single-developer use, local files work. For teams or multi-agent setups, a shared workspace like Fastio stores search output and automatically indexes it for semantic search. Files become queryable through the built-in AI chat, so past research is reusable instead of discarded after each session.
Related Resources
Give your search agents a workspace that remembers
generous storage with automatic semantic indexing. Your agent searches, stores, and shares results from one workspace. No credit card, no vector database setup.