Reported issues for serpapi-mcp

Pod holds 12 of 12 problems reported by people outside the maintainer team. Issues filed by the project's own owners, members and collaborators are excluded entirely — a maintainer's release checklist is not a warning to a prospective user.

Back to serpapi-mcp.

Most discussed

Add mode=formatted for human-readable text output

Problem

LLM agents consuming SerpApi search results face two suboptimal choices:

mode="complete" (full JSON):
- 50KB+ payloads
- Overwhelming signal-to-noise ratio (metadata, tracking, raw HTML)
- Agents waste tokens parsing structure instead of content
mode="compact" (metadata-trimmed JSON):
- Still JSON (agents must parse)
- Still contains low-signal fields (date_detected, position, displayed_link, et

Read the thread · 2026-06-08 · closed · outside contributor · 2 comments

Add json_restrictor parameter for server-side field selection

Problem

SerpApi returns large JSON payloads (often 50KB+) with many fields that agents don't need:

Full search metadata
Raw HTML snippets
Tracking parameters
Auxiliary data structures

This wastes:

Network bandwidth (especially for rate-limited free tier)
LLM context tokens (expensive when processing results)
Parsing time (client-side JSON processing)

Current workarounds (client-side filtering with `

Read the thread · 2026-06-08 · closed · outside contributor · 1 comment

Add MCP safety annotations to search tool

Problem

The search tool lacks MCP safety annotations, making it harder for LLM agents and MCP clients to reason about the tool's behavior and make safe execution decisions.

Solution

Add explicit ToolAnnotations to the search tool:

annotations=ToolAnnotations(
    title="SerpApi search",
    readOnlyHint=True,       # search is read-only; no state mutation
    destructiveHint=False,   # nothing deleted or modified
    idempotentHi

[Read the thread](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-mcp/issues/39) · 2026-06-08 · closed · outside contributor · 1 comment

### Add OAuth 2.0 authentication support to the SerpApi MCP server

While working on the application to submit this MCP server to Anthropic's official connector library, I noticed they require OAuth 2.0 for authenticated services. This is needed to be featured as an official connector [here](https://claude.com/connectors#connectors):

<img width="1069" height="697" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b929019c-b8ff-4a2f-bab1-bc051dacc617" />

Users can still use our MCP as a custom connector by adding it themselves ([ref](https://support.c

[Read the thread](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-mcp/issues/38) · 2026-06-03 · open · external user · 7 comments

### Add a pytest suite and wire it into CI

The dev extras declare pytest and pytest-asyncio, but there's no tests/ dir and CI only runs `uv format --check`, so none of that test tooling actually runs.

I'd add an offline suite for the pure-logic parts of src/server.py plus a workflow that runs `uv run pytest` on PRs. Writing it against a real starlette Request turned up a bug: `search` reads `request.state.api_key` directly, which throws an uncaught AttributeError when state has no api_key (the read sits outside the try/except), so that 

[Read the thread](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-mcp/issues/35) · 2026-06-02 · closed · outside contributor · 2 comments

### Code mode support for SerpAPI MCP

Code mode allows to speed-up bulk search while lower token cost.

<img width="2424" height="926" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2c9d2cc5-07a2-4c3d-9932-2278bdc9ba89" />

Fast MCP 3.0 supports this already.

mcp = FastMCP("Server", transforms=[CodeMode(sandbox_provider=sandbox)])

ref: https://gofastmcp.com/servers/transforms/code-mode

The requirements would be:
 - Test if MCP mode is worth it.
 - Make sure there is no security hole in the currently deploy impl

[Read the thread](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-mcp/issues/34) · 2026-06-02 · open · external user · 2 comments

### 🟢 SpiderRating: Grade B (7.9/10) — Security observations for serpapi-mcp

## SpiderRating Security Observation

Hi! [SpiderRating](https://spiderrating.com) has automatically evaluated this repository as part of our ongoing MCP ecosystem security analysis.

### Score Summary

| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| **Overall Score** | **7.9/10 (Grade B)** |
| Description Quality | 7.3/10 |
| Security Analysis | 8.8/10 |
| Metadata Health | 7.4/10 |
| Security Findings | No issues found |

> View your full report: **[spiderrating.com/servers/serpapi/serpapi-mcp](https:

[Read the thread](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-mcp/issues/29) · 2026-03-14 · closed · external user · 1 comment

### Glama listing is missing Dockerfile

Your MCP server is currently listed on the [Glama MCP directory](https://glama.ai/mcp/servers/ilyazub/serpapi-mcp-server), but it is not available for others to use because it does not have a Dockerfile.

It takes only a few minutes to fix this:

1. Go to your server's listing: [ilyazub/serpapi-mcp-server](https://glama.ai/mcp/servers/ilyazub/serpapi-mcp-server)
2. Click "Claim" to verify ownership.
3. Once claimed, navigate to the [admin `Dockerfile` page](https://glama.ai/mcp/servers/ilyazub/s

[Read the thread](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-mcp/issues/1) · 2025-04-22 · closed · external user · 5 comments

## Most recent

### Fix protocol in GitHub Copilot Desktop and improve UX

I noticed a few issues when searching for and installing the SerpApi MCP through the gallery in the [GitHub Copilot desktop application](https://github.com/features/ai/github-app):

- The title is spelled incorrectly ("Serpapi" and not "SerpApi")
- It's configured to use SSE by default instead of HTTP, which causes requests to fail
- There are no instructions in the dialog for finding your API key and where to put the key (using the HTTP header method might be best, when I put it in the URL it s

[Read the thread](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-mcp/issues/66) · 2026-08-28 · open · external user · 0 comments

### MCP gateway intermittently returning 504 responses

A customer reported intermittent 504 Gateway Time-out responses from the hosted MCP gateway at mcp.serpapi.com.

The issue appears to happen both during the initial MCP connection/tool discovery step and when running searches through MCP. The same API key and comparable requests work successfully through the standard REST API.

From the customer’s report, the failures appear to be environment-specific rather than universal, as requests work from one environment but fail from another.

[Front](ht

[Read the thread](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-mcp/issues/56) · 2026-07-01 · open · external user · 0 comments

### Surface Retry-After header on 429 rate limit errors

# Surface Retry-After header on 429 rate limit errors

## Problem
When hitting SerpApi rate limits (429 Too Many Requests), the error message is generic:

Error: Rate limit exceeded. Please try again later.


Users don't know:
- How long to wait
- What the rate limits are
- That cached results may be available

## Solution
Extract and surface the `Retry-After` header from the 429 response, with actionable guidance:

Error: Rate limit exceeded (HTTP 429). Retry-After: 3600s. Free tier:

Read the thread · 2026-06-08 · closed · outside contributor · 1 comment

Configure safety annotations (readOnlyHint, destructiveHint) for the MCP server

While working on the application to submit this MCP server to Anthropic's official connector library, I noticed they require MCP servers to provide safety annotations for tools, like readOnlyHint, destructiveHint, before they can be listed as an official connector.

Currently, it doesn't seem like we have specified that for the SerpApi MCP server. Please correct me in case I missed that.

Anthropic's connector review process requires tools to clearly indicate whether they:

Are read-only (read

Read the thread · 2026-06-03 · closed · external user · 0 comments

The remaining reports are on the project's issue tracker.