A powerful web crawler that initiates a structured web crawl starting from a specified base URL. The crawler expands from that point like a graph, following internal links across pages. You can control how deep and wide it goes, and guide it to focus on specific sections of the site.
AI agents call tavily-crawl to retrieve information from Tavily MCP Load Balancer without modifying anything — typically the context-gathering step in research, monitoring, and reporting workflows, before the agent takes action elsewhere.
The tool reads and retrieves web content by crawling pages starting from a base URL. It follows links and collects data but does not modify, delete, or execute anything on the target systems. Severity is medium because uncontrolled crawling can generate significant external network traffic, potentially trigger rate limits or ToS violations on target sites, and expose large volumes of data to the AI agent.
From the tool's definition 'web crawler that initiates a structured web crawl starting from a specified base URL' and 'following internal links across pages' — purely retrieves/reads web content
Documented attack patterns abuse exactly the kind of access tavily-crawl gives an agent:
PolicyLayer is an MCP gateway — it sits between your AI agents and Tavily MCP Load Balancer, and nothing reaches the server without passing your rules. This is the rule we recommend for tavily-crawl:
{
"version": "1",
"default": "deny",
"tools": {
"tavily-crawl": {}
}
}tavily-crawl is read-only, so it stays allowed — but everything else on the server is denied unless you say otherwise.
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A powerful web crawler that initiates a structured web crawl starting from a specified base URL. The crawler expands from that point like a graph, following internal links across pages. You can control how deep and wide it goes, and guide it to focus on specific sections of the site. It is categorised as a Read tool in the Tavily MCP Load Balancer MCP Server, which means it retrieves data without modifying state.
Register the Tavily MCP Load Balancer MCP server in PolicyLayer and add a rule for tavily-crawl: 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 Tavily MCP Load Balancer. Nothing to install.
tavily-crawl 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 tavily-crawl 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 tavily-crawl. 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.
tavily-crawl is provided by the Tavily MCP Load Balancer MCP server (yatotm/tavily-mcp-loadbalancer). PolicyLayer sits as a proxy in front of this server to enforce policies before tool calls reach the server.
Deterministic rules across all 3 Tavily MCP Load Balancer tools. Per-identity grants. Full audit log. Live in minutes. Nothing to install.
Free to start. No card required.
3 Tavily MCP Load Balancer tools catalogued and risk-classified — across an index of 42,500+ MCP servers.