The MCP ecosystem in numbers (October 2026)

Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol on 25 Nov 2024. Less than two years later, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft all support it, and the SDKs are downloaded close to half a billion times a month.

If you're deciding whether your business needs an app for ChatGPT and Claude, the hype won't help you. The numbers might. Here they are as of 17 Oct 2026, each linked to its source. Where we only saw a figure in secondary reporting, we say so.

How fast it spread

Within five months of launch, Microsoft, OpenAI and Google had all signed on. Here's the timeline.

The Agentic AI Foundation is supported by Google, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare and Bloomberg as well as its founders, according to the MCP blog. That matters more than any single launch. A protocol that no one company controls is one competitors can build on.

By December 2025, the same post listed first-class MCP support in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and VS Code.

Downloads: about five times in under eight months

SDK downloads are the closest thing to a usage meter the protocol has.

From 97M to close to 500M a month is roughly five times in under eight months. Downloads aren't people, so read this as momentum, not users. The direction is clear.

How many servers are there?

It depends who you ask, and what they count.

All sizes as stated by the site on 17 Oct 2026.

Treat these as self-reported counts. Each site counts its own way, nobody audits the totals, and the lists overlap. A count tells you nothing about whether a listed server is maintained, signed in properly or working today. We also found no official total for the MCP Registry or for ChatGPT's plugin directory, so we haven't put a number on either.

The gap between the open lists and the reviewed one is the real story. Claude's 973 connectors are fewer than 1 in 100 of Glama's count. Getting into a reviewed directory is a different job from publishing a server.

The official MCP Registry does show entries from big names when you search it: we found com.stripe, com.atlassian, com.paypal.mcp, com.canva.mcp and com.cloudflare.mcp on 17 Oct 2026. On Claude, live connector pages on the same day included Stripe, PayPal, Atlassian, Notion, Canva, Figma, Linear, Asana, HubSpot and Shopify.

Who's on the other end

Directories matter because of the people behind the assistants.

Weekly and monthly figures don't compare directly. We left Claude out because we found no official user figure from Anthropic.

AI agents are also turning up on websites directly. Cloudflare says daily AI-agent requests grew more than 1,700% in a year (30 Sep 2026), and that automated traffic overtook human traffic in May 2026, well ahead of its original forecast for the second half of 2027. These are Cloudflare's own figures and aren't independently audited.

How well AI agents do on MCP tasks

Here's the sobering part. On benchmarks built from real MCP servers, the best models of 2025 failed about half the tasks.

Two things stand out. Models are improving fast: Anthropic's own evals moved by up to 25 points with better tool handling. And tool design matters as much as the model. In the Terminal Agents study, the same models did roughly twice as well calling APIs directly as they did through MCP tools.

Description quality is a big part of that. The paper MCP Tool Descriptions Are Smelly! (16 Feb 2026) found that 97.1% of 856 tool descriptions on 103 servers had at least one problem, and 56% didn't state the tool's purpose clearly.

Security: a lot of servers are open

The fast growth left gaps.

The spec has moved to close these gaps. Since 2025-06-18, it has required PKCE and audience checks and forbidden token passthrough, and 2025-11-25 made clients use the S256 PKCE method whenever they can. Version 2026-07-28 deprecates dynamic client registration. But a spec only protects servers that adopt it.

Commerce: discovery, not checkout (yet)

If you sell things, the numbers are encouraging and humbling at once.

• Traffic is growing. Adobe Analytics reports AI-referred traffic to US retail sites rose 693.4% year on year in the 2025 holiday season (7 Jan 2026). In Q1 2026 it rose 393%, and in March 2026 it converted 42% better than other traffic.
• In-chat checkout disappointed. Walmart's in-ChatGPT checkout converted at about one-third the rate of click-throughs to Walmart.com, as reported by Search Engine Land (Mar 2026), citing Daniel Danker in WIRED.
• OpenAI changed course. In March 2026 it deprioritized Instant Checkout. Merchants now use their own checkout, and its commerce protocol is used for product discovery, according to OpenAI's announcement as seen in search results.
• Big brands say the same. Etsy told Retail Dive (14 May 2026) that shoppers used ChatGPT to learn about products, then came to Etsy to buy. Expedia's CEO said on its Q1 2026 call (7 May 2026) that AI-channel traffic and bookings are still small, but the mix of new users, conversion and order size is encouraging.

What this means for a business deciding now

Here's the honest caveat first: none of these numbers says an app will bring you customers. Being in a directory isn't a promise that an assistant will recommend you. What the numbers do say:

• The protocol question is settled. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic all support MCP, and a neutral foundation runs it. You're not betting on one vendor.
• The audience is large. ChatGPT alone reports 1.2 billion weekly users.
• The open lists are crowded; the reviewed ones aren't. More than 100,000 servers sit in the largest community index. Claude's reviewed directory shows 973. A reviewed listing has far fewer neighbours.
• Quality decides the outcome. Benchmarks show agents failing about half of MCP tasks, and the Terminal Agents study shows MCP tools doing worse than a browser when they're generic. A bad app can be worse than no app.
• Security is the price of entry. Use OAuth, a current spec version and sign-in on anything private. Many servers today don't.
• Measure before you trust it. In our own staging test on one site with synthetic data (a small sample), the first app we generated for an HTML-only site passed 0 of 6 tasks while the website passed 6 of 6. After we added page-reading tools, one launch passed 3 of 3 tasks on both. Only a side-by-side test told us which was true.

A short checklist if you're starting now:

1. List the five or so jobs customers ask you to do most.
2. Check how AI agents handle those jobs on your website today.
3. Build tools for those jobs only, with reads and writes split.
4. Set the annotations both directories require.
5. Host it on your domain with OAuth through your existing sign-in.
6. Test the app against the website, several runs per task, and only submit when the app passes at least as many.

Transica does steps 3 to 6: it turns your API spec, what AI agents observe on your site, or an existing MCP server into tools you approve, checks them against ChatGPT's and Claude's published rules, hosts them on your domain, checks connected servers' tools every 6 hours, and runs side-by-side AI agent tests with exact pass counts. To go deeper, read our guides to the ChatGPT app directory, the Claude connectors directory, MCP server hosting, turning your API into an MCP server and managing your AI app listings. Or start with step 2: a free scan of your page, no account needed.