The agentic web, measured
An open, versioned read on the public MCP server ecosystem, triangulated across four sources and updated weekly. The headline counts everyone repeats are inflated; the useful signal is the gap between what registries advertise and what is actually maintained. Code and methodology are public so anyone can check us.
Latest scan: 2026-06-06 · 18 scan passes to date · the series cannot be backfilled.
From advertised to evaluable
Registries advertise an order of magnitude more servers than are genuinely usable. Glama alone auto-indexes 31,752 repos. Here is the drop from everything catalogued to the maintained, evaluable working set.
By source
| Source | Listed | With a repo | Remote-only |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our GitHub deep-scan | 2,468 | 2,468 | — |
| Glama | 31,752 | 31,752 | 0 |
| Official MCP registry | 10,997 | 9,388 | 1,609 |
| Smithery (reports 5,933; API exposes 300) | 300 | 0 | 300 |
Deduped union across all sources: 38,157 distinct repositories plus 1,909 remote-only / hosted servers with no public repo.
The subset we assess in depth
The series
Catalogued servers (orange) and the maintained subset (grey, dashed), captured weekly. It starts thin on purpose: a longitudinal record can't be reconstructed after the fact, so the value is in starting it and never missing a week.
Methodology & honest caveats
- Firsthand and open. Scanned via the open-source scanner (GitHub topic + org search). Read-only; no third-party servers are probed.
- Four sources, deduped. Beyond GitHub topic search we cross-reference the official MCP registry, Glama, and Smithery, then dedupe by repository. Glama auto-indexes broadly (low signal); the official registry is authoritative; Smithery's public API exposes only 500 of its reported 5,933.
- Population is a lower bound. Search-driven discovery misses untagged repos, so the true count is somewhat higher than what we catalogue.
- Transport is a heuristic. stdio / HTTP / both is inferred from README phrasing. A signal, not ground truth.
- No security scores yet. Vulnerability probing is a later sweep; we don't publish those numbers as fact until it runs.
Cite this
Major Labs (2026). State of MCP: an open dataset of the public MCP server ecosystem. majorlabs.co/data, accessed 2026-06-06.
Stable URL. A versioned DOI is planned.