Hermes Agent + Bright Data: Building the Definitive Web-Aware AI Assistant

In this tutorial, you will learn:

• What Hermes Agent is and what it offers as an autonomous AI agent framework.
• Why adding reliable web access makes AI agents more accurate and production-ready.
• How Bright Data enhances Hermes Agent with web search, scraping, and data discovery tools.
• How to connect the Bright Data Web MCP to Hermes Agent.
• How to extend Hermes with the Bright Data skills.
• What the Bright Data + Hermes Agent integration enables through a practical, real-world example.

Let’s dive in!

What Is Hermes Agent?

Hermes Agent is an autonomous, self-improving AI framework featuring cross-session memory and an automated skill-learning loop.

Hermes can run locally on your machine or continuously on a server or VPS, making it suitable for both personal and always-on agent deployments. It supports software development, research workflows, and automation tasks.

With more than 220,000 GitHub stars, Hermes Agent has strong community support, with many plugins and integrations. It is fully open-source under the MIT license, while premium managed options are available through Hermes Cloud.

Main Features

The core capabilities provided by Hermes Agent are:

• Persistent memory: Remembers preferences, projects, environments, and learned information across different sessions.
• Internal toolset: Comes with built-in tools for web search, terminal execution, files, memory, and browser automation.
• Skills system: Loads specialized knowledge on demand, extending capabilities while minimizing context usage.
• MCP integration: Connect Hermes Agent to external tools, APIs, databases, and services through MCP servers.
• Scheduled tasks: Automates recurring workflows using natural language instructions or cron expressions.
• Subagent delegation: Creates specialized child agents to handle parallel tasks with isolated contexts.
• Voice conversations: Enables real-time voice interactions through CLI and messaging platforms.
• Context-aware workflows: Uses files, references, and project context to adapt responses to specific environments.

Why Provide Hermes Agent with Reliable Web Access

The impressive numbers achieved by Hermes Agent demonstrate that it is a solid autonomous AI agent framework. However, to become truly production-ready and effective, an AI agent must be able to:

• Interact with web pages as part of automated workflows.
• Retrieve data from platforms that were not included in the original model training data.

Hermes Agent addresses those needs with built-in web search, scraping, and browser automation tools. However, these native capabilities may not be designed for production-grade web data workflows. As a result, they might struggle with large-scale web extraction or websites protected by anti-bot mechanisms such as rate limits and CAPTCHAs.

This is where Bright Data comes in!

By connecting Hermes Agent with Bright Data, the agent gains access to enterprise-ready tools for live web search, structured data extraction, source discovery, browser automation, and dataset retrieval.

What makes Bright Data integration stand out is its global infrastructure, including more than 400 million residential IPs. This architecture provides the scalability, anti-bot bypass features, and performance required for real-world web data workflows. It supports unlimited concurrency, offers 99.99% uptime, and achieves a 99.95% success rate.

How Bright Data Supports Hermes

Bright Data integrates with Hermes Agent through two complementary components:

• Bright Data Web MCP: An MCP server exposing 70+ tools for web search, scraping, data extraction, and browser automation.
• Bright Data Agent Skills: A set of Agent Skills that help Hermes Agent understand when and how to use Bright Data products effectively.

Important: These integrations work best together. In detail, the Bright Data skills can guide Hermes in selecting and using the most appropriate Web MCP tools. Also, they provide general best practices for improving knowledge of Bright Data product usage.

Bright Data Web MCP

Web MCP exposes more than 70 tools powered by Bright Data’s API-based products.

Even in Rapid mode (the free tier with 5,000 requests/month), it offers useful tools for common web tasks:

Tool	Description
search_engine + batch version (search_engine)	Retrieves results from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex.
scrape_as_markdown + batch version (scrape_batch)	Converts web pages into clean Markdown with bot protection handling.
discover	Performs AI-powered search returning ranked, relevant web results.

To get all 70+ tools, you need to [enable Pro mode](https://github.com/brightdata/brightdata-mcp?tab=readme-ov-file#-pricing, modes). This unlocks structured data extraction tools for platforms such as Amazon, LinkedIn, Yahoo Finance, YouTube, Zillow, Google Maps, and 40+ additional websites. Also, it includes tools for browser automation via Bright Data’s Browser API.

Bright Data Agent Skills

The Bright Data skills give Hermes Agent specialized knowledge for using Bright Data products and workflows.

The available skills include:

Skill	Description
agent-onboarding	Helps agents configure Bright Data integrations and choose the right setup.
search	Searches Google and returns structured search results.
scrape	Scrapes webpages into clean Markdown while bypassing bot protection.
discover-api	Explains how to use Bright Data Discover API.
data-feeds	Extracts structured data from 40+ websites automatically.
brightdata-cli	Guides Bright Data CLI usage for scraping and extraction.
bright-data-mcp	Guides usage of Bright Data MCP tools for web tasks.
bright-data-best-practices	Provides guidance for Bright Data APIs and integrations.
live-research	Creates research reports using live web data.
competitive-intel	Performs competitor analysis using live web data.
brand-listening	Analyzes brand mentions and audience sentiment.
price-comparison	Compares prices across online retailers.
seo-audit	Performs SEO audits using live web data.
design-mirror	Replicates UI patterns and design systems.

Getting Started with Hermes Agent

Time to address the few steps required to install and configure Hermes Agent on your local machine.

Note: If you already have Hermes Agent set up locally, you can skip to the next section.

In the next two chapters, you will see how to integrate Bright Data with Hermes Agent using MCP and Agent Skills, respectively.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have:

• An API key from one of the LLM providers supported by Hermes Agent. Here, we will use an OpenAI API key.
• An account on one of the many communication channels supported by Hermes Agent. Below, we will connect it to Telegram. Follow the official guide to create a Telegram bot and get its bot token.

Step #1: Install Hermes Agent

To install the command-line version of Hermes Agent on Linux, macOS, or WSL 2, run:

curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

On Windows, execute:

iex (irm https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.ps1) 

Refer to the official quickstart guide for additional installation instructions.

Alternative approach: To install both the command-line and desktop applications, download the Hermes Desktop installer from the official website and launch it.

This is the output of the Hermes Agent CLI installer:

As you can see, the installer automatically handles all the prerequisites required by Hermes Agent, including uv, Python 3.11, Node.js, ripgrep, ffmpeg, and more.

Great! Hermes Agent is now installed locally.

Step #2: Set Up Hermes

The CLI installer will guide you through the Hermes Agent setup process. For more control over the configuration, select the “Full setup” option:

Note: If you already have OpenClaw installed locally and have integrated it with Bright Data, you can choose the OpenClaw import settings option instead.

Next, you will be prompted to select an AI provider to power Hermes Agent. Choose the provider for which you have an API key. In this case, we will connect an OpenAI model. Thus, select “OpenAI”:

Choose the “OpenAI API” option:

Paste your OpenAI API key, and then select the default model (e.g., gpt-5.4-mini):

Continue with the setup process. You can leave the remaining options unchanged and skip the communication channel configuration for now, as you will take care of that in a later step.

Great! Hermes Agent is now configured and ready to launch.

Step #3: Launch the Web Dashboard

To access the Hermes Agent web dashboard, run the following command:

hermes dashboard

The web dashboard will be available at:

http://127.0.0.1:9119

Open the above URL in your browser, and you should see:

Fantastic! From here, you can visually control and manage your Hermes Agent instance.

Step #4: Connect Telegram

In the Hermes Agent web dashboard, reach the “Channels” page and configure your preferred communication channel. In this setup, we will use Telegram.

In the “Telegram” card, proceed by selecting either the “CREATE WITH QR” or “MANUAL SETUP” workflow.

During the process, you will be prompted to enter your Telegram bot token.

After completing the setup, restart the Hermes messaging gateway when requested:

If you are not familiar with it, the Hermes messaging gateway allows you to chat with your AI agent across more than 25 supported platforms.

Once configured, the “Telegram” channel status will change to “Connected”:

Next, open Telegram. Use the command below to launch the bot connected to your local Hermes Agent instance (in this example, the bot is called “My Hermes Agent”):

/start

You will receive a message containing a pairing command to link Telegram with your local Hermes Agent instance:

In your terminal, run the received command:

hermes pairing approve telegram <PAIRING_CODE>

Wonderful! Telegram is now fully connected and paired with your Hermes Agent setup. You can start chatting with your AI agent directly in Telegram.

Step #5: Test the Integration

Greet the AI agent through Telegram by sending a message such as:

Hey!

Hermes will ask you to set the current Telegram channel as its home channel, which is where the agent will deliver responses. Confirm that with the following message:

/sethome 

After completing this step, Hermes Agent will respond to your original greeting message with something like this:

Mission complete! Hermes Agent is now installed, configured locally, and connected to a Telegram bot, allowing you to easily chat with it.

How to Connect Hermes Agent to the Bright Data Web MCP

In this section, you will be guided through setting up the Bright Data Web MCP in Hermes Agent.

Prerequisites

Before going through the setup, make sure you have a Bright Data account with an API key configured. Follow the documentation to generate your Bright Data API key.

While not strictly required, you should also have:

• A basic understanding of how MCP works.
• Familiarity with the tools provided by the Bright Data Web MCP.

Step #1: Test the Bright Data Web MCP Locally

Before connecting the Bright Data Web MCP to Hermes Agent, check that the MCP server runs on your machine.

Start by installing the Web MCP package globally using @brightdata/mcp:

npm install -g @brightdata/mcp

On Linux, macOS, or WSL s, verify that the MCP server starts correctly with:

API_TOKEN="<YOUR_BRIGHT_DATA_API>" npx -y @brightdata/mcp

Or, on PowerShell, run:

$Env:API_TOKEN="<YOUR_BRIGHT_DATA_API>"; npx -y @brightdata/mcp

Replace <YOUR_BRIGHT_DATA_API> with your actual Bright Data API key. This command sets the required API_TOKEN environment variable and launches the Web MCP server locally. For more information, refer to the Web MCP documentation.

If everything is configured correctly, you should see startup logs like these:

On the first run, the @brightdata/mcp package automatically creates two APIs in your Bright Data account:

• mcp_unlocker: Used to connect to the Bright Data Web Unlocker API and SERP API.
• mcp_browser: Used to interact with the Bright Data Browser API.

These APIs power the 70+ tools exposed by the Bright Data Web MCP server. You can also configure custom APIs, as described in the official repository.

To verify that the default APIs were created successfully, open the “Web Access > Web Access API” section in the Bright Data control panel. You should see both APIs listed in the “My APIs” table:

By default, the Web MCP server starts in Rapid mode (free tier), which provides access to a limited set of tools. To unlock all 70+ tools, enable Pro mode by setting the PRO_MODE=true environment variable:

API_TOKEN="<YOUR_BRIGHT_DATA_API>" PRO_MODE="true" npx -y @brightdata/mcp

Or, on Windows PowerShell, run:

$Env:API_TOKEN="<YOUR_BRIGHT_DATA_API>"; $Env:PRO_MODE="true"; npx -y @brightdata/mcp

Note: Pro mode [incurs additional charges](https://github.com/brightdata/brightdata-mcp?tab=readme-ov-file#-pricing, modes).

Awesome! You have tested that Bright Data Web MCP locally. In the next step, you will integrate it into Hermes Agent.

Step #2: Configure the Web MCP in Hermes

Return to the Hermes Agent web dashboard and open the “MCP” page. Click the “ADD SERVER” button to configure a new MCP connection:

For the Bright Data Web MCP integration, fill out the “ADD MCP SERVER” modal as follows:

• NAME: bright-data-web-mcp
• TRANSPORT: stdio
• COMMAND: npx
• ARGS: @brightdata/mcp
• ENVIRONMENT (KEY=VALUE PER LINE):

API_TOKEN=<YOUR_BRIGHT_DATA_API_KEY>
PRO_MODE=true

This configuration instructs Hermes to connect to the Bright Data MCP server via npx -y @brightdata/mcp while setting these two environment variables:

• API_TOKEN (required): Set it to your Bright Data API key.
• PRO_MODE (optional): Set to true to enable Pro mode. Set it to false or remove PRO_MODE=true to run the Web MCP in Rapid mode.

Confirm by clicking “ADD”. Hermes Agent now has all the information required to start the Bright Data Web MCP server locally (using the same command explored in the previous step) and connect to it. Cool!

Step #3: Verify That the Integration Works

After adding the MCP server, a bright-data-web-mcp card will appear on the MCP page:

If you configured the Web MCP in Pro mode, you will see all 70+ Web MCP tools available. Otherwise, Hermes Agent will only have access to the limited set of tools included in the free tier (Rapid mode).

This confirms that Hermes Agent can see the Bright Data Web MCP tools. Later in this tutorial, you will see the Bright Data Web MCP + skills integration in action.

How to Extend Hermes Agent’s Knowledge with Bright Data Agent Skills

Here, you will see how to add the Bright Data skills to Hermes Agent via Vercel’s skills tool.

Prerequisites

Before following the section, verify that you meet these requirements:

• You are operating on a UNIX-based OS (e.g., Linux, macOS, or WSL 2).
• The Bright Data CLI is installed and set up locally (this is the main prerequisite for the Bright Data skills). For a quick setup of the Bright Data CLI, refer to the Bright Data CLI: Installation & Setup documentation page. Otherwise, read the dedicated blog post.
• Node.js is installed locally.

Plus, it is recommended to have:

• Some knowledge of the Agent Skills standard.
• Familiarity with Vercel’s skills CLI tool.
• A basic understanding of what the Bright Data skills provide.

Alternative installation approach: If you prefer to install the Bright Data Agent Skills manually rather than using the skills CLI, start by cloning the Bright Data Skills repository. Then, copy the Bright Data skills to the Hermes Agent skills directory ~/.hermes/skills/ (%USERPROFILE%\.hermes\skills\ on Windows):

git clone https://github.com/brightdata/skills
cp -r skills/skills/* ~/.hermes/skills/

Otherwise, follow the automated installation steps below instead!

Step #1: Install the Bright Data Agent Skills

To install the Bright Data agent skills in Hermes Agent through the skills CLI, run:

npx skills add brightdata/skills -a hermes-agent

The above command:

1. Installs the skills.
2. Launches a CLI wizard to download the Bright Data skills from the Agent Skills Directory and install them in Hermes.

First, you will be prompted to select which Bright Data skills to install:

Toggle each skill with the Space bar to select them all, then press Enter. skills will ask whether you want to install them for the current project or globally.

Choose the “Global” option:

Review the security assessment and confirm the installation. You will see a final message like the following:

Amazing! The Bright Data skills have now been copied to the Hermes Agent skills directory.

Step #2: Check that the Skills Are Available

Restart Hermes Agent. Open the web dashboard, navigate to the “SKILLS” page, and search for “bright data”:

You should see all the Bright Data agent skills that were just installed.

The skills are enabled by default, so Hermes Agent can immediately use them whenever they are relevant to a task. Here we go!

Hermes Agent + Bright Data: Testing the Integration

To test the enterprise-grade web access features that Bright Data brings to Hermes Agent, you need a realistic use case.

Suppose you are a YouTube content creator and want to turn Hermes Agent into your personal YouTube assistant. That is possible thanks to Bright Data’s web scraping and browsing capabilities, together with the YouTube-specific premium tools exposed through Web MCP (powered by the Bright Data YouTube Scraper):

Web MCP Pro Tool	Description
web_data_youtube_videos	Retrieves structured metadata for a YouTube video from its URL without scraping the page.
web_data_youtube_profiles	Retrieves structured information about a YouTube channel from its URL without scraping.
web_data_youtube_comments	Retrieves structured comments from a YouTube video, with an optional limit on the number of comments.

The Bright Data Web MCP allows Hermes Agent to navigate YouTube and retrieve statistics and data from channels and videos.

Below, you will use your Bright Data-enhanced Hermes setup to retrieve statistics from one YouTube video. Then, the agent will analyze the video’s comments to identify audience sentiment, highlight valuable feedback, and suggest ideas for future videos.

See how to do it!

Step #1: Provide the Agent with the Initial Context

Before getting started, disable the built-in youtube-content skill:

When interacting with YouTube, you want Hermes Agent to utilize the Bright Data Web MCP tools instead. These are more reliable, scalable, and provide richer data.

Next, give your agent a role by sending this message:

From now on, keep in mind that you're my YouTube assistant. I want you to help me grow my channel by providing advice on how to better engage my audience, improve my content, and increase my reach.

Hermes Agent will update its memory and reply with a confirmation similar to this:

Now, instruct the agent to always rely on the Bright Data Web MCP when web access is required:

When I ask you to retrieve information from the web, search the internet, or interact with web pages, use the Bright Data Web MCP.

Pro tip: Consider disabling Hermes Agent’s built-in web search and browsing tools. Once the Web MCP is configured, it provides a more powerful and comprehensive alternative.

Step #2: Retrieve the YouTube Video Stats

Assume you are the author of this YouTube video about Hermes Agent:

You want to analyze its performance and decide whether it makes sense to create follow-up videos. Begin by asking your agent to retrieve the video’s main statistics:

Retrieve the main information and stats from my latest YouTube video about Hermes Agent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_N84t1rUU0

The agent will start by calling some tools:

More specifically, Hermes Agent performed these actions:

1. Used tool_search to find the most suitable tool for the task.
2. Identified the web_data_youtube_videos Web MCP tool (only available in Pro mode) as the appropriate tool.
3. Called it with the provided YouTube URL.

If you open the Hermes web dashboard, navigate to the “SESSIONS” page, open the session history, and scroll through the messages. You will find a message related to the web_data_youtube_videos tool call:

The tool returns structured YouTube data extracted directly from the video and formatted as LLM-ready JSON.

After processing that data, Hermes Agent produces a response like the following:

From the agent’s reply, you can clearly see key metrics such as views, publication date, and other useful video information.

Step #3: Analyze the YouTube Video Comments

Since the video achieved impressive results, the next step is to analyze its comments. Continue the conversation with a message like this:

Wow, the video has performed really well! Now, scrape its comments and provide insights into the video's engagement level and the most important feedback I received. Give me also potential ideas for future videos based on the comments.

Again, Hermes Agent will identify and use the most suitable tool for the task:

The agent called the web_data_youtube_comments Web MCP tool to scrape the latest 100 comments from the YouTube video.

After analyzing them, Hermes Agent provided a detailed sentiment analysis section together with 20 potential video ideas inspired by audience feedback:

Et voilà! This demonstrates the power of a Hermes Agent setup enhanced with Bright Data. Keep in mind that this is just a simple example. The integration opens the door to many other powerful use cases involving web data, automation, and AI agents.

Conclusion

In this blog post, you learned what Hermes Agent is and how it enables autonomous AI workflows. In particular, you explored how to extend its capabilities by connecting it with Bright Data’s Web MCP and official skills.

By integrating with Bright Data, Hermes Agent gains full, unrestricted, scalable access to public web data and advanced web interaction tools. For more details, explore the full range of AI-ready services available in the Bright Data ecosystem.

Create a Bright Data account for free today and give your AI agents real-time access to the web!