NetLens

An MCP server for unobstructed web reading. It fetches any URL directly with browser-like headers — past robots.txt and naive bot blocks — and returns the full page as clean, ad-stripped Markdown, not a summary. Plus web search that returns real links. Zero dependencies: pure Python standard library.

Built for AI Agents

AI agents constantly hit pages their built-in tools can't read. NetLens fixes the three usual reasons a fetch comes back empty or useless:

It does not try to defeat JavaScript/Cloudflare challenge pages or CAPTCHAs — that's out of scope by design. When a page is a hard block, the HTTP status is surfaced honestly rather than faked.

Installation

npm (via npx):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "netlens": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "netlens-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

PyPI (via uvx):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "netlens": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["netlens-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Add either to your MCP client config (e.g. .mcp.json for Claude Code), then restart the session so the tools load.

Tools

web_search

Search the web and return real result links (title, URL, snippet), parsed locally — links, not summaries. Follow up with web_fetch to read a result.

A search fetches a single result page (~10 results), returned in full by default so nothing at position 9/10 is dropped. There's no deep pagination — if the answer isn't in the first page, refine the query.

web_fetch

Fetch any page and return its full content as clean Markdown.

Workflow: web_search to find pages, then web_fetch to read them.

Search engines

Search is a pluggable, selectable registry. In auto mode NetLens tries engines in order and returns the first with results, so a rate-limit/challenge page on one falls through to the next.

Pick per call with the engine argument, or set a default with NETLENS_SEARCH_ENGINE.

Configuration

| Environment Variable | Default | Description | |---|-

... View full README on GitHub