Crawl a site and return a manifest of pages with titles and snippets.
AI agents call crawl_site to retrieve information from Searxng without modifying anything — typically the context-gathering step in research, monitoring, and reporting workflows, before the agent takes action elsewhere.
This tool performs information retrieval only: it fetches and catalogs page metadata (titles, snippets) from a website. No data is created, modified, deleted, or executed. The operation is idempotent and causes no state changes beyond temporary HTTP requests.
From the tool's definition Tool description states it 'crawl[s] a site and return[s] a manifest of pages with titles and snippets' — retrieval and aggregation of publicly available data with no modification or side effects.
Documented attack patterns abuse exactly the kind of access crawl_site gives an agent:
PolicyLayer is an MCP gateway — it sits between your AI agents and Searxng, and nothing reaches the server without passing your rules. This is the rule we recommend for crawl_site:
{
"version": "1",
"default": "deny",
"tools": {
"crawl_site": {}
}
}crawl_site is read-only, so it stays allowed — but everything else on the server is denied unless you say otherwise.
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Crawl a site and return a manifest of pages with titles and snippets. It is categorised as a Read tool in the Searxng MCP Server, which means it retrieves data without modifying state.
Register the Searxng MCP server in PolicyLayer and add a rule for crawl_site: allow, deny, rate-limit, or require approval. Point your MCP client at the PolicyLayer proxy URL and the rule is enforced on every call, before it reaches Searxng. Nothing to install.
crawl_site is a Read tool with low risk. Read-only tools are generally safe to allow by default.
Yes. Add a rate_limit block to the crawl_site rule in your PolicyLayer policy. For example, setting max: 10 and window: 60 limits the tool to 10 calls per minute. Rate limits are tracked per agent session and reset automatically.
Set action: deny in the PolicyLayer policy for crawl_site. The AI agent will receive a policy violation error and cannot call the tool. You can also include a reason field to explain why the tool is blocked.
crawl_site is provided by the Searxng MCP server (tadmstr/searxng-mcp). PolicyLayer sits as a proxy in front of this server to enforce policies before tool calls reach the server.
Start from Searxng, add the rest of your stack, and see everything your agents can call. Then put policy on all of it.
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6 Searxng tools catalogued and risk-classified — across an index of 43,000+ MCP servers.