Live Research

What it does

When your agent uses it

• The user wants live research
• Research <topic deeply
• Research the latest on
• Write a report on

Example prompts

• “live research”
• “research <topic deeply”
• “research the latest on”
• “/live-research”

Requirements

• A Bash shell
• A credential in BRIGHTDATA_API_TOKEN

Workflow steps

7 steps, taken from the step headings in SKILL.md.

1. 1Scope the question (do this first, don't skip)
2. 2Decompose into sub-questions
3. 3Run Discover per angle (in parallel), with content
4. 4Merge, dedup, rank, quality-gate
5. 5Read & extract claims
6. 6Synthesize the brief
7. 7Verify before delivering

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 81f51af. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  Ships 1 file in scripts/ (Shell), which the agent can run.

  Shell commands in SKILL.md call:

  • jq

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  No URLs in SKILL.md.

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names these keys or tokens, usually read from environment variables:

  • BRIGHTDATA_API_TOKEN

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Live Research loads about 1.8k tokens when it runs, and up to ~2.4k if it reads all its reference files. Until then it costs about 218 tokens; SKILL.md has 667 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~218

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~1.8k

With references · SKILL.md plus every file in references/, read only if the agent opens them

~2.4k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); the scripts in this folder are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from brightdata/skills at commit 81f51af, republished under its MIT licence (© brightdata). 667 words, ~1,829 tokens.

name

live-research

description

Produce a deep, multi-source, cited research brief on a topic from live web data using Bright Data's Discover API (intent-ranked web search + parsed page content). Use when the user wants "live research", to "research <topic> deeply", "research the latest on", "write a report on", "give me a briefing / literature review / market scan", "find and synthesize everything about", or otherwise wants a synthesized, source-grounded answer rather than a list of links. Decomposes the question into multiple intent-ranked Discover queries, pulls page content, deduplicates and ranks by relevance, then synthesizes a structured brief with inline citations. Built on the `discover-api` skill. For competitor-specific intel use `competitive-intel`; for social/brand sentiment use `brand-listening`; for a retrieval *system* (not a one-off report) use `rag-pipeline`.

metadata.author

Bright Data

metadata.version

1.0

command -v bdata >/dev/null 2>&1 || echo "CLI missing — see bright-data-best-practices/references/cli-setup.md"
bdata zones >/dev/null 2>&1 || echo "not authenticated — run: bdata login"

# one call per angle; --include-content so you read sources in the same pass
bdata discover "stablecoin regulation 2026" \
  --intent "recent regulatory actions and proposed legislation, primary sources" \
  --include-content --num-results 15 -o angle_regulation.json &

bdata discover "stablecoin reserve transparency" \
  --intent "audits, attestations, reserve composition disclosures" \
  --include-content --num-results 15 -o angle_reserves.json &
wait

# VERIFIED: this is the correct merge. `jq -s 'add | unique_by(.link)'` does NOT work —
# each file is {results:[...]}, so you must flatten .results[] first.
jq -s '
  [ .[].results[] ]                                   # flatten results from all files
  | unique_by(.link)                                  # dedup by URL
  | map(select(
      .content != null
      and (.content | length) > 200                   # drop empty / 404 stubs
      and ((.content | test("just a moment|captcha|access denied|cf-browser|page not found|post not found"; "i")) | not)
    ))
  | sort_by(-.relevance_score)
' angle_*.json > corpus.json
echo "kept $(jq length corpus.json) sources"

© brightdata, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 2 other files (scripts, references) in skills/live-research of brightdata/skills.

• SKILL.md
• references/brief-template.md
• scripts/merge_corpus.sh

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 81f51af