crewAI
crewAI is a Python framework for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI agents that work together as a crew. Connect You.com’s remote MCP server and your agents get the Search API, Research API, and Contents API through MCP tools — no per-tool integration code.
If you only need Search API access, start with https://api.you.com/mcp?profile=free. The ?profile=free query parameter skips authentication setup and improves time to 200 for both humans and agents. It exposes you-search with 100 queries per day and does not require an API key.
The integration uses crewAI’s built-in MCP support. You can wire it up two ways:
MCPServerHTTP— declarative DSL on theAgent.mcps=[...]field. Recommended for most use cases.MCPServerAdapter— explicit lifecycle control via context manager. Use when you need fine-grained control or theyou-contentstool (see Known limitation below).
Choose Your MCP URL
Getting Started
Install the Packages
Requires Python 3.10+.
Set Your API Key
Skip this step for ?profile=free. Set an API key when you need you-research, you-contents, or higher limits for you-search:
Get your API key at you.com/platform/api-keys.
Free Search With MCPServerHTTP
Use the free profile when you want the fastest path to a working you-search tool:
The free profile only exposes you-search. Use the authenticated URL for Research API and Contents API access.
The free profile does not support livecrawl. Use the authenticated MCP URL
when you want Search API results to include full page content.
Search and Research With MCPServerHTTP
For authenticated Search API and Research API workflows, pass your API key in the Authorization header and filter the exposed tools:
Use HTTP headers for the bearer token. Passing the API key as a query
parameter (?api_key=...) does not work — You.com’s MCP server only accepts
bearer auth on the Authorization header.
you-search can return full page content for web results, news results, or
both. Set livecrawl to web, news, or all, and set
livecrawl_formats to markdown or html. This requires the authenticated
MCP URL and does not work with ?profile=free. livecrawl returns the same
full page content as Contents API, but it fetches content for every matching
search result.
Known Limitation
crewAI’s DSL path converts MCP tool schemas into Pydantic v2 models internally. Its array-type mapping produces {"items": {}}, which OpenAI rejects with BadRequestError. In practice, you-contents cannot be used through MCPServerHTTP today. you-research may also hit schema compatibility issues in some OpenAI-backed runs. If that happens, restrict the DSL to you-search with create_static_tool_filter, and use MCPServerAdapter for Research API or Contents API access.
Contents and All Tools With MCPServerAdapter
MCPServerAdapter (from crewai-tools[mcp]) exposes MCP tools as standard crewAI BaseTool objects. Use this path for you-contents and for any Research API workflow that hits the DSL schema issue. The underlying mcpadapt library can generate Pydantic schemas with invalid fields (anyOf: [], enum: null) that OpenAI rejects, so the schemas need a small patch before being handed to an Agent.
you-contents is not available on the free profile. Use the authenticated URL with an API key or OAuth.
In MCP, the standard HTTP transport is streamable HTTP — "http" and
"streamable-http" resolve to the same transport. You.com’s MCP server does
not support the SSE transport.
Filtering Tools
Restrict an adapter to a subset of tools at construction time, or pick a single tool by name:
Multi-Agent Search and Extraction Crew
Use this pattern when one agent should find sources and another should extract full page content from selected URLs.
The search agent uses MCPServerHTTP. The extraction agent uses MCPServerAdapter because you-contents currently requires the schema patch shown above.
This example uses the authenticated MCP URL so the search agent can call you-search with livecrawl.
livecrawl functions exactly like the Contents API, but it automatically fetches content for every web or news result.
Use Contents API as a second step if you want to decide which URLs to extract.
Available Tools
The You.com MCP server exposes one tool per API. See the MCP server docs for the full reference.
Security: Prompt-Injection Trust Boundary
Search and content tools return raw text from arbitrary websites. That text lands in the agent’s context and creates an indirect prompt-injection surface (Snyk W011) — a malicious page can embed instructions the agent might follow.
Add a trust boundary sentence to every agent’s backstory. In crewAI, backstory is the agent’s system context:
you-contents carries the highest risk because it returns full HTML/markdown. Always include the trust boundary when any of the three tools are enabled, and avoid passing user-supplied URLs to you-contents without validation.
Skill: ydc-crewai-mcp-integration
Prefer to have your coding agent wire this up for you? Install the ydc-crewai-mcp-integration skill from the agent skills collection:
Then ask your coding agent: “Integrate You.com MCP with my crewAI agents.”
Resources
Official crewAI docs for agents, tasks, and crews
crewAI’s MCP integration guide for MCPServerHTTP and MCPServerAdapter
Official crewAI guide for you-search, you-research, and the free profile
Official crewAI guide for you-contents and adapter schema patching
Endpoint, authentication, and full tool reference
Parameters and response schema for you-search
Parameters and response schema for you-research
Parameters and response schema for you-contents