What an MCP server is, and what one can do to your website
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. An MCP server is a doorway in front of software you already own: it tells an assistant like ChatGPT or Claude what that software can do, and the assistant then asks for those things, in plain words, on your behalf. It is not a model, it does not think, and it holds no content of its own. On a website, what it can reach is exactly what that website's own interface will hand over — and that turns out to differ enormously from one platform to the next.
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The word "server" misleads people. Usually nothing is installed anywhere, and there is certainly no robot sitting inside your website. What exists is a list of named jobs — read a page, create a draft, change a title — and a way for an assistant to ask for one of them. The list is the whole thing. If a job is not on the list, no amount of asking produces it.
What the protocol actually is
Model Context Protocol is a published way for an AI client to find out what a piece of software offers and then use it. The client — ChatGPT, Claude, or anything else that speaks it — connects to an address, asks "what can you do?", and gets back a list of tools with a name and a description each. After that the conversation is ordinary: you ask for something in your own words, the assistant picks the tool that fits, fills in the details and sends it.
The important half is the half people skip. The server decides what is on the list. An assistant cannot invent a tool, cannot reach past the list into the software behind it, and cannot do anything the server has not written down and agreed to do. That is not politeness, it is how the protocol works — and it is why a well-built MCP server is a safer way to let an assistant near your website than handing over your password and letting it click.
What one can do to a website
The jobs worth having fall into four groups. Every one of them is something a person already does by hand in an administration screen, which is the test of whether it belongs here at all.
- Reading. The list of pages and posts, who wrote each one, when it last changed, whether it is published, and the full text of any one of them. This group works everywhere, because every platform lets its own interface read.
- Writing something nobody can see yet. A new draft, a change to one that is not published, an image put into the library with its description filled in.
- Changing what visitors see. Publishing, unpublishing, scheduling, editing a page that is already public, menus, redirects. A different kind of power from the group above, and it should be asked for separately — on this product it is.
- Looking things up about the site itself. Which version it runs, how many pages it has, what is installed, what has an update waiting. Reading only, here, by decision rather than by accident.
What one cannot do, whatever it is told
Three limits are worth knowing before you connect anything, because these are the ones people assume away.
- It cannot reach past the website's own interface. No database, no files on disk, nothing the site does not publish through its API. If a field is not in the API, it does not exist as far as any MCP server is concerned.
- It cannot see your design. On most platforms the layout, the theme and the arrangement of a page are not in the API at all. An assistant can write the words on a page; it cannot move the box the words sit in.
- It cannot do what the platform refuses. This is the one that surprises people, and it is what the table below is about: two websites that look identical to a visitor can allow completely different things.
Why the answer depends on your platform
We have written adapters for 11 content systems and driven each one's official API. The table is read out of those adapters when this page loads. There are 14 jobs on our list, and no platform offers all 14.
| What you can ask for | WordPress | Joomla | Drupal | Craft CMS | Concrete CMS | Ghost | Webflow | Wix | Contentful | Strapi | Sanity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read content | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Create content | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Edit content | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Publish content | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Schedule content | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Manage images and files | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Manage categories and tags | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Edit SEO information | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Manage menus | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Custom content types | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Bulk changes | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| Site information | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Manage redirects | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Administrative information | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
This table is generated from the adapters when the page loads, not typed out. A green cell means the software will attempt that job on that platform; a grey one means it refuses before it tries, because the platform offers no supported way to do it. Bulk work is the one row that is empty for every platform: no adapter claims it yet, and the automation page says so too.
Read down a column and you get a platform's honest shape. Read across a row and you get something more interesting: every one of 11 platforms can be read, created in, edited and published to, and after that they diverge immediately. 6 can write SEO metadata. 3 can reach a menu — WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, and nobody else. 1 can manage a redirect. One row is grey the whole way across: bulk work is claimed by no platform here yet, and our automation page says so too rather than describing it as though it were ready.
What it feels like to use one
You type a sentence. "Which pages have not been touched in over a year?" comes back as a list. "Draft a post about the new opening hours" comes back as a draft, waiting in your own administration screen for you to read. Nothing reaches the public site unless you asked for that specifically and granted the permission that allows it. The useful part is not that an assistant can write — plenty of things can write. It is that it can read your whole site first, which is the part almost nobody does before writing.
Honest limit: 11 of the 20 platforms in our catalogue have an adapter, and the table above covers those 11. The other 9 have nothing built, so there is no row to put them in. And a green cell means the software will attempt the job — not that anybody has watched it work. That is a separate and stronger claim, recorded per capability with a date: 9 of the 11 have been exercised against a live installation so far.
Questions we get asked about this
- Does an MCP server go on my website?
- Not on this product. The server runs here and talks to your website through the interface your website already has. One platform, WordPress, has an optional small plugin for the few things its API cannot answer; on the others nothing of ours is installed at all.
- Can ChatGPT and Claude both use the same one?
- Yes. That is the point of it being a published protocol rather than one company's plugin: anything that speaks MCP can connect, and you approve what it may do when you connect it.
- What happens if I ask for something the platform cannot do?
- You get told, in a sentence, that the platform has no way to do it — not a half-finished attempt and not a plausible-sounding yes. A refusal that explains itself is worth more here than an answer that might be true.