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Ssekyanzi Jackson — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:51:28 +0000

I built a keyless web search package for Laravel AI agents (no API keys, no per-query cost)

Ssekyanzi Jackson — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:49:01 +0000

Laravel's AI SDK made building agents genuinely pleasant, but the moment my agent needed the web I hit the same wall everyone hits: provider-native search only exists on some providers (my production model has none), and every hosted search API is another key, another quota, another line on the bill.

So I wrapped a local keyless search engine into three ordinary Laravel AI tools and published it:

github.com/ssekyanzijackson/laravel-agent-web-search

composer require ssekyanzijackson/laravel-agent-web-search
php artisan web-search:install

use AgentWebSearch\Tools\{WebSearchTool, WebFetchTool, ResearchTool};

public function tools(): array
{
    return [new WebSearchTool, new WebFetchTool, new ResearchTool];
}

What you get:

web_search for current facts and local sources, web_fetch to read a page as clean markdown (PDFs and bot-walled pages included), and research which searches and reads the top sources back as cited extracts.
Works on any provider the SDK supports, including providers with no native search.
Measured defaults, not guesses: a 3 second search deadline (engines answer in 1 to 2 seconds; blocked ones were eating the rest), batched page reads at about 1.7 seconds for two pages, and instant repeats through caching.
No key, no quota, no per-query cost. If you want paid coverage later you can point the engine at Tavily, Brave, Exa or Serper with automatic fallback, without touching your code.
No engine installed? The tools say so honestly and the agent carries on with its other tools.

Honest caveats, because a launch post without them is marketing: the engine is a separate AGPL install (nothing of it is bundled), it is a young project, engine reach depends on your host's network (run donsetch doctor to see which engines your server can reach), and on a tiny VPS heavy parallel research leans on CPU.

MIT, tested with a stub engine plus a live probe, CI on PHP 8.3 and 8.4. I would love feedback from anyone running agents in production. Especially: what would you want the read layer to do better?

DEV Community: Ssekyanzi Jackson

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I built a keyless web search package for Laravel AI agents (no API keys, no per-query cost)