Census of the registry: 25,125 distinct servers from 82,994 version records

[ashishsinha1602]

I took a full census of the registry and wanted to share the numbers, since I could not find them published anywhere.

Method

Retrieved every record from GET /v0/servers by cursor pagination in August 2026, continuing until no cursor was returned: 82,994 version records over 830 pages, resolving to 25,125 distinct servers from 15,468 publishers after filtering on isLatest.

Retrieval script: https://github.com/ashishsinha1602/dataset-integrity-audit/blob/main/fetch_mcp_registry.py

The unit-of-analysis trap

This is the part I would flag for anyone else measuring the registry. The endpoint returns one record per version, not per server.

Unit	Records	Sharing a description
Version records (as returned)	82,994	61,859 (74.5%)
Distinct servers (isLatest)	25,125	904 (3.6%)

Read as a catalogue the registry looks three-quarters duplicated. It is not — that figure is release cadence. Mean is 3.30 versions per server; the maximum is 1,175 versions of one server. Measuring without deduplicating inflates duplication by about 20x.

Shape of the registry

Publishers are extremely long-tailed. 13,848 publishers (89.5%) have registered exactly one server. The ten largest account for 15.7% of all servers. Any "X% of MCP servers do Y" statistic is therefore describing a handful of bulk publishers unless it is weighted.

Transports (servers may declare more than one):

Transport	Servers
Remote, streamable HTTP	13,279
Package, npm	7,985
Package, PyPI	3,434
Remote, SSE	1,054
Package, MCPB	891
Package, OCI	821
Package, NuGet	105
None declared	393

Metadata: no required field is missing from any record. 5,643 servers (22.5%) have no repository link, so their implementation cannot be inspected from the registry entry. Descriptions are capped at 100 characters, median 89.

Small concrete gaps

I opened #1579 for the actionable part: 387 active servers declare neither remotes nor packages, 262 deprecated servers remain listed, and 8 entries still carry the unedited [describe what your server does] template.

Caveats

Snapshot from August 2026; counts will drift. I measured only what records declare — I did not attempt to connect to any endpoint, so I cannot say how many of the 24,732 servers that do declare a transport are actually reachable.

Happy to rerun this periodically if a longitudinal view would be useful to the maintainers.