Jina AI MCP Server for Claude

Overview

The Jina AI MCP Server is the official remote Model Context Protocol server from Jina AI. It gives Claude access to Jina's full Search Foundation stack: Reader (URL-to-markdown), web and academic search, image search, embeddings, reranker, and PDF extraction. The server is hosted at https://mcp.jina.ai/v1 — no local installation is required. It ships 19 tools and is licensed under Apache-2.0.

Basic tools (reading a URL, single search) work without an API key but are rate-limited. A free key from jina.ai unlocks parallel search, higher quotas, and all premium APIs.

Key capabilities

• read_url — fetch any URL and convert it to clean, LLM-friendly markdown.
• capture_screenshot_url — capture a screenshot of a URL.
• parallel_read_url — fetch multiple URLs simultaneously.
• search_web — run a web search and return structured results.
• search_arxiv — search academic papers on arXiv.
• search_ssrn — search papers on SSRN.
• search_images — search the web for images.
• sort_by_relevance — rerank a list of text passages by relevance to a query.
• classify_text — classify text into provided categories.
• deduplicate_strings — remove near-duplicate items from a list.
• extract_pdf — extract and convert PDF content to markdown.
• expand_query — generate richer search query variants.
• primer — fetch a short summary of a topic to ground a conversation.
• guess_datetime_url — estimate the publish date of a URL.

How it compares

Jina is the only MCP server combining URL-to-markdown, parallel web + academic search, and embeddings/reranker in a single endpoint — making it well-suited for RAG pipelines and research workflows.

Installation

Claude Code

claude mcp add -s user --transport http jina https://mcp.jina.ai/v1 \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer ${JINA_API_KEY}"

Omit the --header flag if you want to try without an API key (rate-limited).

Claude Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "jina-mcp-server": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote", "https://mcp.jina.ai/v1",
        "--header", "Authorization: Bearer ${JINA_API_KEY}"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Requirements

• A Jina AI API key (free tier available at jina.ai).
• An MCP client (Claude Code or Claude Desktop).

Security

• The server is fully remote — your API key travels in the Authorization header; use HTTPS.
• Treat JINA_API_KEY as a secret: store it in your shell environment or MCP client config, never commit it.

Source Verification Notes

Verified on 2026-06-18:

• The official repository github.com/jina-ai/MCP (Apache-2.0) documents the remote endpoint, the 19 tools, the optional API-key header, and the Claude Code installation command.
• Jina's API dashboard confirms API key issuance and rate-limit tiers.
• Jina's developer documentation describes the Reader, Search, Embeddings, and Reranker services that back the MCP tools.
• Claude Code's MCP documentation describes the --transport http flag and the --header pattern used above.