| name | tavily-cli |
| description | Web search, content extraction, crawling, and deep research via the Tavily CLI. Use this skill whenever the user wants to search the web, find articles, research a topic, look something up online, extract content from a URL, grab text from a webpage, crawl documentation, download a site's pages, discover URLs on a domain, or conduct in-depth research with citations. Also use when they say "fetch this page", "pull the content from", "get the page at https://", "find me articles about", or reference extracting data from external websites. This provides LLM-optimized web search, content extraction, site crawling, URL discovery, and AI-powered deep research — capabilities beyond what agents can do natively. Do NOT trigger for local file operations, git commands, deployments, or code editing tasks.
|
| compatibility | Requires tavily-cli (`curl -fsSL https://cli.tavily.com/install.sh | bash`) and a Tavily API key from tavily.com. |
| allowed-tools | Bash(tvly *) |
Tavily CLI
Web search, content extraction, site crawling, URL discovery, and deep research. Returns JSON optimized for LLM consumption.
Run tvly --help or tvly <command> --help for full option details.
Prerequisites
Must be installed and authenticated. Check with tvly --status.
tavily v0.1.0
> Authenticated via OAuth (tvly login)
If not ready:
curl -fsSL https://cli.tavily.com/install.sh | bash
Or manually: uv tool install tavily-cli / pip install tavily-cli
Then authenticate:
tvly login --api-key tvly-YOUR_KEY
Workflow
Follow this escalation pattern — start simple, escalate when needed:
- Search — No specific URL. Find pages, answer questions, discover sources.
- Extract — Have a URL. Pull its content directly.
- Map — Large site, need to find the right page. Discover URLs first.
- Crawl — Need bulk content from an entire site section.
- Research — Need comprehensive, multi-source analysis with citations.
| Need | Command | When |
|---|
| Find pages on a topic | tvly search | No specific URL yet |
| Get a page's content | tvly extract | Have a URL |
| Find URLs within a site | tvly map | Need to locate a specific subpage |
| Bulk extract a site section | tvly crawl | Need many pages (e.g., all /docs/) |
| Deep research with citations | tvly research | Need multi-source synthesis |
For detailed command reference, use the individual skill for each command (e.g., tavily-search, tavily-crawl) or run tvly <command> --help.
Output
All commands support --json for structured, machine-readable output and -o to save to a file.
tvly search "react hooks" --json -o results.json
tvly extract "https://example.com/docs" -o docs.md
tvly crawl "https://docs.example.com" --output-dir ./docs/
Tips
- Always quote URLs — shell interprets
? and & as special characters.
- Use
--json for agentic workflows — every command supports it.
- Read from stdin with
- — echo "query" | tvly search -
- Exit codes: 0 = success, 2 = bad input, 3 = auth error, 4 = API error.
