Anyfetch

Anyfetch

Web search and web fetch for AI agents. One small binary, no API keys, and it reads the sites that refuse your agent.

Free and open source, from the makers of AliasMode.

Agent harnesses fetch pages with a bot identity, and a large part of the web answers 403. Anyfetch sends the request a real browser sends, so your agent gets the page.

Anyfetch read 28 sites that no other tool in the table could read. Among them: The New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Economist, Medium, Reddit, Stack Overflow, IMDb and YouTube.

Thirteen of the questions are about a page on a site that blocks AI agents. The built-in fetch could not read any of those 13 pages. Its search found the answer in another source for 7 of them. Anyfetch answered 12 in both runs. The questions were written from pages that Anyfetch can read, so this group shows what the built-in tools miss.

Sites: measured on 2026-10-12 with version 0.8.0. Questions: measured on 2026-10-12 with version 0.7.1. Time and memory: measured on 2026-10-11. All from a cloud server, with no proxy except in the proxy row. See how we measured and how to run it again.

What your agent gets

• Search with no key. Brave, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo results, with domain and date filters, quoted phrases and paging. Specialist sources for GitHub, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, arXiv and research papers. Or your own SearXNG.
• Search and read in one call. Ask for the top results together with the result list, and get the parts of each page that match your query.
• Answers, not whole pages. Give a question with the URL, and get only the parts of the page that match it. The Python 3.15 release notes are 218,000 characters; the answer to one question about them came back in 2,200.
• Clean Markdown. Links, tables and code blocks stay intact. Long pages come in parts.
• PDFs. Papers and reports come back as text, page by page.
• Sites that need JavaScript. Anyfetch reads the data inside the page, and uses the site's public API or feed for Stack Overflow, Reddit, IMDb, X posts, PyPI and crates.io. A Reddit thread comes with every comment and its score. No browser runs. For pages that hold nothing without their scripts, it can use Lightpanda, an optional small engine.
• News and answers. Full articles on Reuters and Bloomberg, the latest articles of The Economist, and the answers on Quora, from the data that these sites send.
• Home pages and listings. A page with no single article comes back as its headlines and links, in page order.
• Browser-grade requests. Safari's TLS, HTTP/2 and header fingerprint. A refused fetch is retried automatically, as the same browser or as a second one. Bot checks that are one fixed step, as on Reddit and Behance, are passed.
• Cloudflare checks. When a site insists on a JavaScript check, your own Firefox passes it once. After that, Anyfetch reads the site with plain requests.
• Fast on repeat. Several pages in one call, fetched at the same time. A page fetched in the last 15 minutes comes from a local copy.
• Lightweight. A 16 MB Rust binary. No bundled browser, no JavaScript engine, no Python, no Node.
• Works everywhere. A stdio MCP server for agent harnesses, and a plain CLI for everything else.

Install

macOS and Linux:

curl -fsSL https://aliasmode.github.io/anyfetch/install.sh | sh

Windows, in PowerShell:

irm https://aliasmode.github.io/anyfetch/install.ps1 | iex

The installer puts anyfetch in ~/.local/bin. Then it connects Anyfetch to each agent harness that it finds on the machine: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Hermes Agent, Pi, Cline, Amp, OpenClaw and Cursor. Start a new agent session, and the agent has web_search, web_fetch and web_fetch_many.

Did you install a harness later? Run anyfetch setup. It uses each harness's own command, tells you what it connected, and is safe to run again.

Do you have Node.js? Then no install is needed. Give your MCP client this server, and npx gets the program for your platform:

{

"mcpServers": { "anyfetch": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@aliasmode/anyfetch", "mcp"] } } }

Only Claude Code, on macOS or Linux? You can install Anyfetch as a plugin instead. The plugin gets the program at its first start:

claude plugin marketplace add aliasmode/anyfetch && claude plugin install anyfetch@anyfetch

Inside Claude Code 2.1.275 or later, this is one step: /plugin install anyfetch --marketplace aliasmode/anyfetch. Use the plugin or the installer, not both, or the agent sees every tool twice.

Connect your agent by hand

anyfetch setup does this for you. To do it by hand, each harness needs one command.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --scope user anyfetch -- anyfetch mcp

Codex

codex mcp add anyfetch -- anyfetch mcp

or in ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.anyfetch]

command = "anyfetch" args = ["mcp"]

Hermes Agent

hermes mcp add anyfetch --command anyfetch --args mcp

Hermes connects, lists the tools and asks to enable them. Answer Y.

Pi

pi mcp add anyfetch -- anyfetch mcp

Pi hides MCP tools behind its code mode by default. To show the tools to the model directly, set the exposure in ~/.pi/agent/mcp.json:

{

"mcpServers": { "anyfetch": { "command": "anyfetch", "args": ["mcp"], "exposure": "direct" } } }

Gemini CLI

gemini mcp add -s user anyfetch anyfetch mcp

OpenCode — in ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json:

{

"$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json", "mcp": { "anyfetch": { "type": "local", "command": ["anyfetch", "mcp"], "enabled": true } } }

Cursor — in ~/.cursor/mcp.json:

{

"mcpServers": { "anyfetch": { "command": "anyfetch", "args": ["mcp"] } } }

More harnesses

Any other MCP client: add a stdio server with the command anyfetch and the argument mcp.

Anyfetch is in the official MCP Registry as io.github.aliasmode/anyfetch, and on npm as @aliasmode/anyfetch.

No MCP? Give the agent the CLI. Add this to AGENTS.md or the harness's instruction file:

## Web access

• Search the web: anyfetch search " "
• Read pages: anyfetch fetch [ ...] --format markdown

Make it the default. Anyfetch tells the agent to use its tools in place of the built-in web tools. In our test with Claude Code, the agent then chose Anyfetch for 8 of 8 web tasks. Before, it chose Anyfetch for 2 of 8. To take the choice away, turn the built-ins off:

• Claude Code, in ~/.claude/settings.json: "permissions": { "deny": ["WebFetch", "WebSearch"] }
• Codex, in ~/.codex/config.toml: web_search = "disabled"

Use it from the command line

anyfetch search "rust async runtime comparison"

anyfetch search "tokio select" --site docs.rs --time year anyfetch search "postgres vacuum freeze" --read 3 anyfetch search "retrieval augmented generation" --provider papers anyfetch fetch https://stackoverflow.com/questions/231767 --format markdown anyfetch fetch https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762 --max-chars 8000 --offset 8000 anyfetch fetch https://docs.python.org/3.15/whatsnew/3.15.html --query "sampling profiler rate" anyfetch fetch https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://go.dev/ https://ziglang.org/

Output is JSON by default, so scripts and agents can parse it. --format markdown prints only the page content.

Tools

web_fetch

The result has title, description, content (Markdown), total_chars, url (after redirects), status and retrieved_at. To read a long page in parts, call again with a higher offset until it reaches total_chars. The parts come from the local copy, so the site gets one request.

With a query, the page is split at its paragraphs, tables and code blocks. The parts that best match the words of the query come back in page order, under their headings, with [...] where parts are left out. The result then has focused: true. A page with no matching part comes back from its start. A second question about the same page uses the local copy.

HTML becomes Markdown. A PDF becomes text with [Page N] marks. JSON, plain text and XML feeds come back as they are.

web_fetch_many

The result has pages: one entry per URL, in order. Each entry is the page, or its error.

web_search

Each result has title, url and snippet, and content when you set read.

site, time and quoted phrases apply to the web engines. The specialist sources are free p