What is MCP?
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It's an open standard that defines how AI agents — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot, and others — discover and interact with external tools and content. Think of it as the API contract between your product and every AI agent in the ecosystem.
Anthropic introduced MCP, and it has since gained adoption from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. The protocol is on track for IETF standardization. This isn't speculative — it's shipping in production agents today.
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Q&A: The basics
Q: What does an MCP server actually do?
An MCP server exposes a set of structured tools that AI agents can discover and call. Instead of scraping your website and guessing at your content, an agent connects to your MCP server and gets reliable, machine-readable access to your information.
A typical MCP server provides tools like search, get_page, and list_topics. When an agent connects, it sees exactly what capabilities are available, what parameters each tool accepts, and what format the responses come in. No guessing. No hallucination.
Q: How is this different from a regular API?
APIs serve applications you build. MCP servers serve agents you don't control. The difference matters:
- Discovery is built in. Agents can query what tools exist without prior documentation. An API requires someone to read your docs first.
- The protocol is standardized. Every agent speaks MCP the same way. You don't need a Claude integration, a ChatGPT integration, and a Cursor integration — one MCP server serves all of them.
- Responses are optimized for LLM consumption. MCP tools return structured content that models can reason about directly, not HTML or raw JSON blobs that need parsing.
Q: Who is calling my MCP server?
Any AI agent that supports MCP. Today that includes Claude (via Anthropic), ChatGPT (via OpenAI plugin/tool system), Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Perplexity, and a growing list of developer tools and automation platforms. When a user asks one of these agents about your product, the agent connects to your MCP server to get accurate information instead of relying on training data that may be months or years out of date.
Q: Does my site already need one?
If AI agents are answering questions about your product — and they are, whether you've set one up or not — then yes. Without an MCP server, agents guess. With one, they get the real answer. Every day you operate without one, agents are giving users inaccurate or missing information about your product and sending them to competitors who do have MCP endpoints.
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Q&A: Remote-hosted MCP servers
Q: What's the difference between a local and a remote MCP server?
A local MCP server runs on the user's machine. It's launched by the agent's host application (like Cursor or Claude Desktop), typically as a subprocess. It has access to local files, databases, and tools — great for personal developer workflows, but invisible to the outside world.
A remote MCP server runs on the internet at a public URL. Any agent, anywhere, can connect to it over HTTPS. This is the model that matters for businesses: your MCP server lives at a stable endpoint (like mcp.your-domain.com), and every agent in the ecosystem can discover and use it.
The distinction is like the difference between running a script on your laptop and deploying a web service. Both are useful, but they solve fundamentally different problems.
Q: Why would I want a remote MCP server instead of just telling users to install a local one?
Three reasons:
1. Reach. A local MCP server only works for users who manually install and configure it. A remote MCP server works for every agent, for every user, automatically. When someone asks Claude a question about your product, Claude can connect to your remote MCP endpoint without the user doing anything.
2. Freshness. Local servers serve whatever was bundled at install time. Remote servers serve your current content. When you update your docs, change your pricing, or ship a new feature, every agent sees the update immediately.
3. Zero friction. Users don't install your MCP server. They don't configure it. They don't update it. Agents discover it through registry listings, DNS records, and .well-known files. The whole point is that it just works — no user action required.
Q: Where does a remote MCP server run?
Anywhere you'd run a web service. The server is an HTTP endpoint that speaks the MCP protocol (JSON-RPC over HTTPS). You can deploy it on your existing infrastructure, run it as a serverless function, or use a managed service.
The simplest deployment pattern is a dedicated subdomain: mcp.your-domain.com. A single CNAME record points that subdomain to your MCP infrastructure. Your main site stays untouched — the MCP server is a separate surface purpose-built for agent interaction.
Q: Is it safe to expose my content to any agent?
MCP servers give you full control over what you expose. You choose which tools to make available, what content they can access, and what rate limits to enforce. This isn't opening your database to the internet — it's publishing a curated, read-only interface to information you already make public on your website.
In practice, most MCP servers expose the same content that's on your public site, just in a format agents can consume reliably. Search your docs, retrieve a specific page, list available topics. Nothing an agent couldn't get by scraping your site — but structured, fast, and accurate.
Q: How do agents find my remote MCP server?
Through multiple discovery channels:
- DNS records — A CNAME at
mcp.your-domain.comis the primary signal. - Well-known files —
/.well-known/mcp.jsonon your apex domain tells agents where your MCP endpoint lives. - Agent registries — Public directories like MCPRegistry and agent-skills indexes list available MCP servers.
- Skills manifests — A
/.well-known/agent-skills.jsonfile describes what your MCP server can do in a machine-readable format.
The more discovery channels you support, the more agents find you. But a DNS record and a well-known file cover the vast majority of traffic.
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Q&A: Practical concerns
Q: How much traffic will my MCP server get?
It depends on your product's visibility. Sites with strong search presence and active user communities see thousands of MCP requests per day. Smaller sites might see dozens. The important thing is that the number is growing — fast. Agent usage is compounding, and early MCP adopters are building usage history that compounds their discovery advantage.
Q: What does the traffic look like?
MCP traffic is bursty and intent-driven. An agent connects, calls one to three tools (typically a search followed by a page retrieval), and disconnects. Sessions are short — sub-second for most tool calls. The volume pattern looks more like an API than a website: fewer but more purposeful interactions, each one representing a user who's actively trying to learn about or use your product.
Q: Do I need to maintain it?
Like any service, an MCP server needs to stay current. When your content changes, your MCP server should reflect those changes. This can be manual (re-index on demand) or automated (scheduled crawl-and-sync). The maintenance burden is comparable to keeping a search index fresh — not zero, but far less than building custom integrations for every agent platform.
Q: What happens if I don't set one up?
Agents will continue trying to answer questions about your product using whatever they can find: training data (possibly outdated), web scraping (unreliable), and inference (often wrong). Your competitors who do have MCP servers will get accurate representation. Over time, agents will preferentially recommend products they can reliably query — and that means products with MCP endpoints.
The gap compounds daily. Every day without an MCP server is another day your competitors build usage history, registry presence, and agent trust that you'll have to overcome later.
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The bottom line
MCP is the protocol layer between AI agents and your product. A remote-hosted MCP server makes your product discoverable, queryable, and accurately represented across every agent in the ecosystem — without requiring users to install anything.
The question isn't whether you need one. It's how long you can afford to go without.