What Tavily Provides
Tavily is a search and retrieval API designed for agentic workflows. Unlike general-purpose search APIs, Tavily returns clean, structured results optimized for LLM consumption — no scraping, no HTML noise, just content ready to pass into a prompt. Once connected through TrueFoundry, Tavily exposes five tools:| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| tavily_search | Search the web for current information on any topic. Returns snippets and source URLs. Configurable depth (basic, advanced, fast, ultra-fast), topic filter, time range, and domain include/exclude lists. |
| tavily_extract | Extract raw page content from a URL in markdown or plain text format. |
| tavily_crawl | Crawl a website starting from a base URL. Extracts content across pages with configurable depth and breadth. |
| tavily_map | Map a website’s structure. Returns a list of all URLs found starting from a base URL. |
| tavily_research | Perform comprehensive multi-source research on a topic or question. Gathers information from web pages, documents, and other resources, and returns a synthesized detailed response. |
How TrueFoundry Manages the MCP Server
TrueFoundry’s MCP Gateway acts as a reverse proxy between your agents and MCP servers like Tavily. When you add Tavily as a managed MCP, TrueFoundry handles:- Hosting and availability — The Tavily MCP server runs at a stable TrueFoundry-managed endpoint. You do not configure or maintain it.
- Authentication — Agents authenticate once to the TrueFoundry MCP Gateway. The gateway handles outbound auth to Tavily. Your Tavily credentials are stored with you through the OAuth2 flow; TrueFoundry does not receive them.
- Tool-level access control — You can selectively enable or disable individual Tavily tools per team from the TrueFoundry UI.
- Audit trail — Every tool invocation is traced with the calling user, tool name, input payload, and latency. Traces export via OpenTelemetry to your observability stack.
- Guardrails — TrueFoundry’s guardrail hooks apply at
mcp_pre_tool(before a tool is invoked) andmcp_post_tool(after the tool returns), letting you enforce content policies on search queries and results in real time.
Adding Tavily to TrueFoundry
Open the MCP Server catalog
Navigate to MCP Servers in the TrueFoundry sidebar and click Add new MCP Server. On the next screen, select Connect TrueFoundry Managed MCPs — this opens the catalog of pre-vetted, fully configured MCP servers managed by TrueFoundry.
Add Tavily
Find tavily in the catalog (described as “AI-optimized search for RAG agents”) and click + Add. TrueFoundry registers the server and takes you to the Tavily MCP server detail page. A confirmation toast shows “MCP Server added successfully.”
Authenticate
The Tools tab shows “You’re not connected to this MCP Server.” Click Connect Now. A “Connect via Truefoundry Gateway” popup appears showing the MCP Gateway URL and redirect URL. Review the details and click Approve to complete the OAuth2 authorization flow.
TrueFoundry does not receive your Tavily credentials — the authorization is between your account and Tavily directly.
Connecting to an MCP Client
TrueFoundry exposes the Tavily MCP server over HTTP transport. The endpoint format is:
Using the Tool Playground
Before deploying an agent, you can test any Tavily tool directly in TrueFoundry:Fill in the inputs
For
tavily_search, the key parameters are:| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| Query (required) | The search string |
| Max results | Number of results to return (default 5) |
| Search depth | basic, advanced, fast, or ultra-fast |
| Topic | general or a domain-specific filter |
| Time range | Restrict results to a recency window |
| Include/Exclude domains | Allowlist or blocklist specific sites |
results array where each item includes a url, title, content snippet, and a relevance score. The tavily_research tool returns a synthesized answer field in addition to the raw results.
Tool Metrics
The Tool Metrics tab on the Tavily server detail page shows per-tool usage data: invocation count, latency distribution, and error rates. Use this to monitor which tools your agents are using and whether any tool is producing errors in production.Disabling Individual Tools
If your use case only needs a subset of Tavily’s tools, you can disable the rest from the Tools tab. Each tool has a toggle to enable or disable it. Disabled tools are not callable by agents — they will not appear in the tool list returned to the MCP client. This reduces the tool surface exposed to the agent and avoids unnecessary calls.Next Steps
MCP Gateway Overview
Learn how the TrueFoundry MCP Gateway centralizes access, auth, and observability for all your MCP servers.
TrueFoundry Managed MCPs
Provision pre-vetted MCP servers like Tavily from the TrueFoundry catalogue with just a name.
MCP Gateway Getting Started
Add MCP servers and use them in the AI Gateway playground and IDEs.
Tavily API documentation
Reference for Tavily’s search, extract, crawl, map, and research APIs.
MCP Gateway Security
Configure authentication and guardrails on your MCP servers.