Where to List Your MCP Server: Every Directory and Marketplace (2026)

We recently published the Linkly MCP server everywhere we could find, and it turns out "everywhere" is a moving target: two dozen directories, three incompatible plugin formats, one submission that quietly went nowhere for six weeks, and one that wanted write access to all of our GitHub repos in exchange for a listing with eleven installs.

This is the list we wished we'd had at the start. Every entry below is one we actually submitted to, verified we were already in, or deliberately skipped — with what it needs, what it costs, and how long it took. If you build an MCP server, work down this list in order and you'll cover almost every user who's looking.

Start here: the official MCP Registry

registry.modelcontextprotocol.io — the vendor-neutral registry run by the MCP project itself. Publish here first, because many of the directories below crawl it: we found ourselves already listed on Glama, mcp.directory and PulseMCP without doing anything, purely because we were in the registry.

• How: the mcp-publisher CLI with a server.json; namespaces are DNS-verified (a TXT record on your domain proves you own com.yourcompany/…).
• Supports: remote servers with a remotes block — no package required.
• Cost: free. Review: none — it's a registry, not a curated store.
• Guide: github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry

Tier 1: the AI-assistant marketplaces

These are where end users actually click "Connect". They're curated, reviewed, and reach the largest audiences.

Anthropic — Claude connector directory

claude.com/connectors — surfaced inside Claude.ai, Claude Desktop and Claude Code. Being here means a user searches "your product" in Claude and connects in one click; no URL to paste.

• How: the submission portal at claude.ai/admin-settings/directory/submissions/new. It reads your live tool list, so every tool needs a title and readOnlyHint/destructiveHint annotations before you start.
• Requires: a Claude Team or Enterprise org (~$50/month for the 2-seat minimum) — individual plans can't reach the portal. A privacy policy URL is mandatory; missing one is an automatic rejection.
• Review: human, functional — reviewers run your tools against a test account you supply. Ours took a few days once the portal submission was in.
• Gotcha: approval isn't publication. There's a separate Publish button after approval; the listing isn't public until you press it.

Anthropic — Claude plugin directory

Separate from connectors: plugins bundle an MCP server with skills and slash commands for Claude Code and Cowork. Same portal (…/submissions/plugins/new), same Team-org requirement, lighter automated review, and once published, pushes to your GitHub repo mirror automatically — no re-submission. Your repo needs a .claude-plugin/plugin.json; run claude plugin validate --strict before submitting.

Cursor Marketplace

cursor.com/marketplace — 200+ integrations, one-click install inside Cursor, remote OAuth servers fully supported. You apply as a publisher at cursor.com/marketplace/publish (needs a Cursor account); every plugin is manually reviewed and must be open source. The plugin format lives in .cursor-plugin/plugin.json with MCP servers in a root mcp.json — close enough to Claude's that one repo can carry both manifests. Start from cursor/plugin-template.

Cline MCP Marketplace

github.com/cline/mcp-marketplace — Cline's built-in marketplace, which it says reaches millions of developers. Submission is a GitHub issue with your repo URL, a 400×400 PNG logo, and a reason. Cline installs servers by reading your README with an agent, so add an llms-install.md if setup is anything more than one JSON block. Review "within a couple of days"; they weigh community adoption and maintainer credibility, and say low star counts are fine.

Gemini CLI extensions gallery

geminicli.com/extensions — the easiest of the lot: no submission at all. Put a gemini-extension.json at your repo root (httpUrl for a remote server; OAuth is auto-discovered), add the gemini-cli-extension topic to the repo, and the crawler indexes it within a day. One caveat: Google is moving free-tier users from Gemini CLI to "Antigravity CLI", so watch whether the gallery follows.

Docker MCP Catalog

hub.docker.com/mcp — feeds Docker Desktop's MCP Toolkit. Explicitly accepts remote OAuth servers, not just container images. Submission is a pull request to docker/mcp-registry; the catalog entry appears within about 24 hours of approval.

Tier 2: independent MCP directories

Aggregators with real search traffic. Most auto-index from GitHub or the registry, and most let you claim your listing for a verified badge — worth doing, since a claimed listing beats an anonymous auto-generated one.

A few notes from doing these:

• Smithery scans your live tools on publish and shows a quality score; filling in name, description, homepage and GitHub in Settings took ours from 65 to 89. Its 6-point vendor verification wants a DNS TXT record on your homepage and a backlink to your Smithery page — both free — with a paid developer plan as the final point.
• Claim your listings. Glama, mcp.directory (email hello@mcp.directory), ClaudePluginHub (sign in with the repo-owning GitHub account, or commit a one-time verification file) and mcp.so all let you claim for a verified badge. A claimed listing beats an anonymous auto-generated one, and ClaudePluginHub renders your README as the listing page — so put a homepage link in its first line.
• mcp.so, honestly: we paid the $39. Days later the listing was in neither their site search nor their sitemap, and their pipeline had auto-created a duplicate stub for our endpoint with the wrong auth type. We fixed the stub and filed a ticket. Budget for follow-up if you go this route.
• PulseMCP is hand-reviewed and worth being on, and it ingests the official registry when it resumes — another reason to publish there first.

Curated "awesome" lists

Not directories, but heavily trafficked and heavily crawled.

• punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers (~90K stars) — the big one. Fork, add one line in the right category (there's a Marketing section), open a PR. Their CONTRIBUTING fast-tracks PRs opened by AI agents if you add 🤖🤖🤖 to the title.
• hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code (~50K stars) — strict: your repo must be 14+ days old with continued activity, or have 100+ stars, one submission at a time via their issue form, and the maintainer explicitly warns against treating it as a promotion channel. Worth one shot once you qualify.
• cline/mcp-marketplace and anthropics/claude-plugins-official — see Tier 1; both are GitHub-hosted but not open to direct PRs (Anthropic's auto-closes them).

Ones we'd think twice about

LobeHub (lobehub.com/mcp, 88K servers) — big catalogue, but the only path to publish or claim a listing is a GitHub OAuth grant that requests read and write access to all your public and private repositories, plus gists, workflows and org management. That's for an ownership check that every other directory does with a DNS record or a repo file. We declined; the two stale auto-scraped Linkly entries there had eleven installs between them.

mcpmarket.com — rankings site; rate-limited us on every attempt to reach its submit page.

The other model providers

People ask about Mistral, DeepSeek, Gemini's consumer app, Grok and Perplexity. The short version: Mistral Le Chat has a curated MCP-connector directory, but it's admin-added with no public submission path we could find — end users can add your server as a custom OAuth connector themselves. Gemini's consumer app connectors are partnership-only. DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Grok and Perplexity have no third-party connector directories; users reach MCP servers through each app's custom-connector settings or bridge extensions. For all of these, being in the official registry is your discoverable surface.

Before you submit anywhere: the checklist

Every reviewer or crawler on this list probes the same things. Get them right once and every submission goes smoother:

1. 1
   Answer resources/list and prompts/list even if you have neither — return empty lists, not "Method not found". Smithery's scanner logged an error against our otherwise-healthy server until we fixed this.
2. 2
   Annotate every tool — title, readOnlyHint, destructiveHint, openWorldHint. Anthropic won't accept a listing without them; Smithery and Cursor render them as badges.
3. 3
   Return upstream errors as tool results (isError: true with the real message), not protocol -32603 errors. Reviewers run your tools; an opaque "Internal error" reads as broken.
4. 4
   Ship llms-install.md — Cline installs from it, and it keeps agents from over-reading a long README.
5. 5
   Put a homepage backlink in the first line of your README — several directories render it as your listing page.
6. 6
   A test account with real data. Analytics that are empty because your seeded data aged out of the default window looks identical to broken tools. Ask us how we know.
7. 7
   A privacy policy URL — automatic rejection at Anthropic without one.
8. 8
   One repo, several manifests. .claude-plugin/plugin.json, .cursor-plugin/plugin.json + mcp.json, and gemini-extension.json can all live in the same repo sharing one skills/ directory. One push updates three marketplaces.

What we listed, for the record

The Linkly MCP server — branded short links, click analytics, custom domains and click webhooks — is now on the Claude connector directory, the official registry (com.linklyhq/linkly), Smithery, Glama, mcp.directory, mcp.so and ClaudePluginHub, with Cursor, Cline and the awesome-mcp-servers PR in review. If you spot a directory we've missed, tell us and we'll add it.