Overview
Connect external tools — web search and retrieval providers — that the models you route through BitRouter can call.
A tool is a capability a model picks up at runtime to get work done (see concepts: tools). The integrations here are the web-search and retrieval providers that back BitRouter's built-in web search: bring a key for any of them and every model you route through BitRouter gains a web search — even a model with no native search of its own.
Exa
Neural / semantic web search · EXA_API_KEY
Parallel
Web search + research API for agents · PARALLEL_API_KEY
Firecrawl
Search + scrape to LLM-ready markdown · FIRECRAWL_API_KEY
Tavily
Search built for agents and RAG · TAVILY_API_KEY
How it works
Each provider is a backend of the web_search server tool. You list the ones you have keys for under server_tools.web_search in bitrouter.yaml, in preference-and-failover order, and a request opts in per call by declaring {"type":"bitrouter:web_search"}. BitRouter runs the search itself and feeds normalized results back to the model — see Web search for the loop, the result shape, and per-request overrides.
# bitrouter.yaml — one line per provider you bring a key for
server_tools:
web_search:
backends:
- kind: exa # EXA_API_KEY
- kind: tavily # TAVILY_API_KEY (failover)Need an arbitrary tool, not web search? Any MCP server — a database, a file system, your own API — plugs into BitRouter's MCP gateway. The pages here cover the built-in search providers specifically.
How is this guide?