Tavily Research · tavily-ai/skills · Skills Docs

Skills

Skill 7 of 8

Tavily Research

Conduct comprehensive AI-powered research with citations via the Tavily CLI.

1 minute · 319 words · 8 sections

Install

$ npx skills add tavily-ai/skills --skill tavily-research

$ npx skills add tavily-ai/skills

» /plugin marketplace add tavily-ai/skills

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

AI-powered deep research that gathers sources, analyzes them, and produces a cited report. Takes 30-120 seconds.

Before running

Research requires authentication. Run the requested command directly when tvly is already authenticated; do not add a status check to every invocation.

If tvly is missing, follow the tavily-cli setup. If an installed CLI reports an authentication error, use tvly login for authentication only, or tvly init --skip-skills when guided verification is also useful. Browser-based OAuth is preferred when an interactive user can complete it. --no-browser prints the sign-in link instead of opening it, but still waits for a localhost callback. In an unattended agent or CI environment, leave authentication to the user or use a securely provided TAVILY_API_KEY. Do not start a second login immediately after guided setup has completed.

When to use

You need comprehensive, multi-source analysis
The user wants a comparison, market report, or literature review
Quick searches aren’t enough — you need synthesis with citations
Step 5 in the workflow: search → extract → map → crawl → research

Quick start

# Basic research (waits for completion)
tvly research "competitive landscape of AI code assistants"

# Pro model for comprehensive analysis
tvly research "electric vehicle market analysis" --model pro

# Stream results in real-time
tvly research "AI agent frameworks comparison" --stream

# Save report to file
tvly research "fintech trends 2025" --model pro -o fintech-report.json

# JSON output for agents
tvly

Options

Option	Description
`--model`	`mini`, `pro`, or `auto` (default)
`--stream`	Stream results in real-time
`--no-wait`	Return request_id immediately (async)
`--output-schema`	Path to JSON schema for structured output
`--citation-format`	`numbered`, `mla`, `apa`, `chicago`
`--poll-interval`	Seconds between checks (default: 10)
`--timeout`	Max wait seconds (default: 600)
`-o, --output`	Save the JSON response to a file
`--json`	Structured JSON output

Model selection

Model	Use for	Speed
`mini`	Single-topic, targeted research	~30s
`pro`	Comprehensive multi-angle analysis	~60-120s
`auto`	API chooses based on complexity	Varies

Rule of thumb: “What does X do?” → mini. “X vs Y vs Z” or “best way to…” → pro.

Async workflow

For long-running research, you can start and poll separately:

# Start without waiting
tvly research "topic" --no-wait --json    # returns request_id

# Check status
tvly research status <request_id> --json

# Wait for completion
tvly research poll <request_id> --json -o result.json

Tips

Research takes 30-120 seconds — use --stream to see progress in real-time.
Use --model pro for complex comparisons or multi-faceted topics.
Use --output-schema to get structured JSON output matching a custom schema.
For quick facts, use tvly search instead — research is for deep synthesis.
Read from stdin: echo "query" | tvly research - --json

About this skill

Trigger

Conduct comprehensive AI-powered research with citations via the Tavily CLI. Use this skill when the user wants deep research, a detailed report, a comparison, market analysis, literature review, or says "research", "investigate", "analyze in depth", "compare X vs Y", "what does the market look like for", or needs multi-source synthesis with explicit citations. Returns a structured report grounded in web sources. Takes 30-120 seconds. For quick fact-finding, use tavily-search instead.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Allowed tools: Bash(tvly*)
Source: skills/tavily-research/SKILL.md

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source

github.com/tavily-ai/skills, branch main, last pushed 4 September 2026.

Licence

MIT — the text of every skill is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

8 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. One layout observed: skills/*/SKILL.md.

Issue colours

Resolved from a deterministic hash of the owner name. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Removed “tavily research”, a leading h1 that duplicated the skill title.

Spec compliance

Every skill satisfies the Agent Skills specification’s frontmatter rules.

Images

Images inside a skill come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Tavily, declaring 1 plugin. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /tavily-ai/skills.md, and each skill at its own URL.

.md