Statistics
We called 1,100 remote MCP servers from the official registry. 13% did not answer.
Every MCP directory publishes a count. The official registry listed 23,828 servers when this edition opened, and the large catalogs list tens of thousands more. Counting a listing is not the same as reaching one. We called 1,100 of them, once each, and recorded what came back.
This is edition 2026-08, swept 20 August 2026. Each address was called exactly once. Nothing here describes what any server is doing now. This edition covered 9% of the 12,771 callable addresses in the frame. Endpoints are visited in a fixed pseudo-random order rather than alphabetically, so a partial sweep is a sample of the registry rather than a slice of one end of it.
What answered, and what did not
961 of the 1,100 addresses we called answered as an MCP server, either by listing their tools or by asking who we were. 139 did not answer as one.
| What happened | Endpoints | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Connected | 694 | 63.1% |
| Authorization required | 263 | 23.9% |
| Protocol error | 65 | 5.9% |
| Hostname did not resolve | 42 | 3.8% |
| Unreachable | 17 | 1.5% |
| Not an MCP endpoint | 15 | 1.4% |
| Deprecated HTTP+SSE transport | 4 | 0.4% |
A refusal is not a failure. 263 endpoints (23.9%) answered by asking for credentials. That is a working server guarding itself, so it is counted as answering, not as dead. Reporting it the other way would be a claim we did not verify, and it is the largest single bucket here, so the choice moves the headline more than any other decision on this page.
Most of the registry cannot be called at all
10,630 of the 23,828 servers in the registry (44.6%) ship as an npm or PyPI package with no address. There is nothing to connect to, by design: they run on the machine of whoever installs them. We never execute one, so they are absent from every figure above and are reported here on their own denominator rather than folded into a share that would misdescribe both groups.
The servers that connected did not agree on a protocol revision
Across the 694 servers that completed a handshake, these are the revisions they negotiated with us.
| Revision | Servers |
|---|---|
| 2025-11-25 | 382 |
| 2025-03-26 | 147 |
| 2024-11-05 | 82 |
| 2025-06-18 | 80 |
| 2026-07-28 | 3 |
The tool surfaces were small, with a long tail
The 694 servers that listed their tools exposed 10,718 in total. The median was 7, the smallest 1, and the largest 163. A tool surface sits in a client's context on every request, so the largest number here is a standing cost rather than a score.
How to read these numbers
Every figure above is one call, to one address, on one date. That supports some claims and not others, so here is the scope each number actually carries.
- A result describes an address, not a project. A server behind geo-routing, a rate limit, or a deploy answers the same way as one that is gone, so the aggregate is worth publishing and a single endpoint is not. We name none.
- "Asked for credentials" is a measurement, not a rating. We recorded which addresses wanted a token. Auditing an authorization implementation is a different job and a different claim.
- The official registry is the frame. The large third-party catalogs list many times more servers, and any of them may hold entries the registry never saw.
- Timings stay out of it. A serial sweep from one host measures our own network more than it measures anyone's server, so latency is recorded per call and aggregated nowhere.
Check your own server
The MCP connection tester runs exactly the check described above against one address and hands back a dated record you can share. The endpoints we hand-picked are a separate, smaller corpus with its own denominator.
Built an MCP server? Launch it on the weekly board. We connect to it and publish what it answered, the same way as everything above.
Edition 2026-08: 1,100 addresses called once each, drawn from the 12,771 remote URLs the official registry listed on 20 August 2026.