Tavily setup
The first search engine Larvabot asks.
What it does
Tavily is a web search API built for AI agents. It returns clean results with titles, URLs and snippets.
- Finding list posts, resource pages and directories for your campaigns
- Finding Reddit threads when Reddit itself is unreachable
Get set up
- Sign up at tavily.com and copy your API key
- Paste it in Settings → Search → Tavily API key
- In Tavily's dashboard, keep pay-as-you-go disabled
Where it goes
In the dashboard, open Settings and find the Search section. Secret values are encrypted before they're saved and only their last four characters are ever shown again.
TAVILY_API_KEYStaying free
Larvabot caps Tavily at 950 searches a month and regularly reads Tavily's own usage endpoint. If Tavily reports that fewer than 25 credits are left, Larvabot stops using it until the month resets. It also shows whether pay-as-you-go is switched on, so you can keep it off.
How the quota guard works →Fallback order
For search, Larvabot tries these in order and skips any that aren't set up, are out of free quota or are busy.
- 1Tavily
- 2Linkup
- 3Exa
- 4Brave Search API
- 5SearXNG (your server)
- 6Larvabot search server
- 7Serper (Google results)
- 8Jina Search
- 9DuckDuckGo HTML
More search tools
Curious why Tavily made the cut? Tavily in the free stack →