Nimble

This integration is a remote MCP server offered by Nimble , an Arcade Partner. It exposes Nimble’s web data platform so agents can search, extract, crawl, and map the public web. Add it to an MCP Gateway for central governance, authorization, and access control alongside Arcade’s native servers.

MCP server URL

Register the following URL in Arcade: Servers → Add server. Nimble authenticates with an API key sent in an Authorization header, so the key is stored as a header secret rather than embedded in the URL (see Authentication).

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https://mcp.nimbleway.com/mcp

Authentication

Nimble expects a bearer token in the Authorization header on every request. In Arcade, store the key as a header secret and reference it from a custom header, so the value never appears in the URL or in logs.

Field	Value
Header name	`Authorization`
Header value	`Bearer ${secret:NIMBLE_API_KEY}`
Secret name	`NIMBLE_API_KEY`
Secret value	Your Nimble API key

Set these under Advanced settings → Custom headers when you add the server. See Add remote MCP servers for the full reference.

What you can do

Once you register Nimble in your Arcade project, Arcade discovers its tools automatically. Nimble exposes 27 tools, because most capabilities ship more than one tool: a synchronous call, an asynchronous variant, and status or listing calls. They group into these capabilities:

Capability	Tools	What it does
Search	1	Real-time web search with configurable content richness.
Extract	2	Pull structured content from a specific URL, synchronously or asynchronously.
Crawl	4	Crawl multiple pages on a site, then check progress, list jobs, or cancel a run.
Map	1	Discover the URLs on a site by crawling its pages and sitemap.
Extract templates	7	Browse the template catalog, run templates against a URL, and generate or refine custom ones.
Web search agents	11	Create, update, and run research agents, then poll runs and read their results.
Task results	1	Fetch the status and results of any async task.

Nimble prefixes its own tools with nimble_, and Arcade namespaces each tool under the server ID you choose when you add the server. With the server ID nimble, tool names appear as nimble.nimble_search in the Playground, the gateway tool picker, and SDK calls. Copy the exact name from the tool picker before calling it.

Many Nimble tools are asynchronous: they return a task ID immediately, and your agent polls a companion tool such as nimble_task_results or nimble_agents_run_status for the outcome. When you build a gateway, select the polling tools alongside the tools that start the work, or your agent will kick off jobs it cannot read back.

Compose these tools with Google Docs, Slack, Salesforce, GitHub, or any of Arcade’s native servers in a single MCP Gateway, so an agent can research, draft, and act in one flow, with authorization and audit from Arcade’s runtime.

Cost and token usage

Nimble designs its MCP server around retrieval efficiency. It describes a proprietary index and memory that “gets smarter with every query” to compound accuracy over time, and cutting token costs “by retrieving exactly what’s needed,” without redundant searches or parsing raw pages through an LLM. Its tools return schema-consistent JSON, so your model spends tokens reasoning over results rather than parsing raw HTML. This behavior runs server-side at Nimble.

Web retrieval still returns large payloads, and MCP routes every result through the model’s context window. Two things keep that in check:

Expose only the tools you need. An MCP Gateway sends just the tools you select, so an agent that only searches never loads the crawl and template tool definitions.
Prefer the narrowest tool. Reach for search or extract before crawl or the web search agent, which return content across many pages.

For high-volume retrieval, Nimble also documents a CLI skill as a more token-efficient path than MCP. Use the MCP server when you want Nimble governed alongside your other tools, with Arcade adding per-user authorization and audit at runtime.

Add Nimble to your Arcade project

Get your Nimble API key

Add Nimble as a remote MCP server in Arcade

Open the Arcade Dashboard → Add server. Set:

ID: a name for the server, for example nimble
URI: https://mcp.nimbleway.com/mcp

Under Advanced settings → Custom headers, add the Authorization header and store your key as described in Authentication, then save.

See the full walkthrough in Add remote MCP servers for advanced settings like connection retries, header secrets, and custom headers.

Verify Nimble tools

Confirm that Arcade lists the Nimble tools for your project. They appear in the Playground for this project and in the MCP Gateway tool picker.

Create an MCP Gateway

Go to MCP Gateways → Create Gateway. Select Nimble plus any other MCP servers you want to compose with (for example, Google Docs and Slack). Set the auth mode to Arcade Auth so users authenticate with their Arcade account. Copy the gateway URL. This is what your agent connects to.

Call Nimble tools from your agent

Once you create your gateway, any MCP client that supports Streamable HTTP can use it: Cursor, Claude Desktop, VS Code, or a custom application built with the Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, or OpenAI Agents.