Live web search inside OpenAI Codex
Point Codex at the hosted Search1API MCP server and the agent can search the web, read pages, and check what is trending while it works, with no local process to run and no integration code to write.
What the agent gets
Five tools, no code
Search, news, page reading, sitemap discovery, and trending topics arrive as tools the model can call on its own.
Facts newer than training data
Codex can look up the current state of a library, an API, or a bug report instead of guessing from what it memorized.
Full page text when snippets are thin
A search can return the top results as complete page content in the same request, which is usually what a code question needs.
Add it to Codex
The hosted endpoint connects over Streamable HTTP. codex mcp add writes the entry; the server speaks OAuth 2.1, so codex mcp login stores a token and no key file is needed. If you prefer an API key, the config.toml block is the third step.
codex mcp add — bash
codex mcp login — bash
~/.codex/config.toml — text
Worth knowing
Nothing runs locally. Codex connects to the hosted server over Streamable HTTP, so there is no process to install or keep running.
Prefer an API key to OAuth? Create one in the dashboard and add the http_headers line shown above to the server entry in ~/.codex/config.toml.
Tool calls bill as ordinary API calls: 1 credit per search, plus 1 for each page successfully retrieved. New accounts get 100 free credits.
What people do with it
Check a dependency upgrade against its current changelog before running it.
Read the linked issue, RFC, or spec without switching to a browser.
Search GitHub and docs for a working example of an unfamiliar API.
FAQ
Do I need to install anything locally?
No. The MCP server is hosted, so Codex connects over HTTP. There is no local process to start or keep running.
Where does the configuration go?
codex mcp add writes the server entry into ~/.codex/config.toml for you. Run codex mcp list to confirm it, or /mcp inside the Codex TUI to see it as an active server.
How much does it cost?
New accounts get 100 credits free with no card. A search or news request is 1 credit, and each page successfully retrieved adds 1 more.