MCP Trends through April 2026

Model Context Protocol (MCP) began as Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools, data sources, and services. Since its launch in 2024, MCP has moved from a niche developer protocol to a central part of coding AI, and it has created an ecosystem of MCP servers, gateways, and security tooling.

Trajectory

MCP's trajectory since the start of 2025 shows a trend that early companies grabbed onto before mid-2025 when products and content rapidly saturated the space.

Early phase (January–Jun 2025): Mentions oscillated between 400–860 per week with relatively few companies (29–43) participating. This was the protocol's early-adopter phase.

Mid-year acceleration (Jul–Aug 2025): Activity began climbing, peaking at 1,201 mentions in the week of Aug 25 with 80 posts from 46 companies, the first major spike showing broader market awareness.

October surge (Oct 6, 2025): Mentions hit 1,511, a 60.6% WoW jump, driven by a wave of enterprise-focused content. The company count expanded to 48.

December peak (Dec 8, 2025): The all-time high of 1,741 mentions across 100 posts from 66 companies, a staggering 108% WoW increase. This was followed by the expected holiday trough.

2026 continued growth January through April 2026 shows a new normal of roughly 700–1,100 mentions per week, with periodic spikes (Jan 26: 1,040; Mar 16: 1,483). The company count has expanded significantly, routinely 50–70 companies per week, up from 30–40 in early 2025.

April data and expected trend Data through the end of April shows a stabilization at the current level. 69 companies published blog posts that included MCP in some way in the latest week vs. ~35 average companies doing the same in in early 2025.

MCP continues to be one of the most important protocols for working with LLMs, especially with AI coding tools such as Codex and Claude. This area will likely see growth throughout the remainder of 2026 and is worth investing in beyond basic "What is MCP?" posts and beginner tutorials. Developers are now looking for more technical nuance about what specifically makes for a better MCP server or client, and in what situations MCP is not the right technical fit for a product.

Outlook

Near-term (next 3-6 months): MCP will continue to be a dominant topic, but the conversation is shifting from "what is MCP" to "how do we secure, govern, and scale MCP." The security sub-theme is accelerating. Posts about MCP authentication, authorization, secret management, and supply chain security are increasing in frequency and mention density. Expect MCP gateway vendors to consolidate or differentiate beyond the security basics.

Sustainability: MCP has crossed the threshold from protocol curiosity to infrastructure dependency. The breadth of companies publishing and the diversity of use cases (databases, observability, CMS, security, CI/CD) continue to increase.

What would change the trajectory: - A major security incident involving MCP (e.g., an agent exploiting MCP tool access to exfiltrate data) would temporarily spike mentions but could also trigger enterprise pullback until security issues were addressed - Google or AWS launching a competing protocol with cloud-native integration could fragment the market - Anthropic pulling back on supporting MCP governance could reduce adoption - The emergence of a clear "winner" in the MCP gateway space would consolidate the conversation

Who's Writing About It

MCP content is remarkably broad across categories:

Tier 1: All in on MCP Content and Features

• Merge is the most prolific MCP content publisher, publishing a systematic series of "How to connect to [X] MCP with Claude Code" guides covering Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Slack, Linear, Notion, Google Drive, Cloudflare, and Sentry. Also publishing strategic pieces on MCP servers for sales intelligence.

• Zapier is aggressively positioning its MCP integration as a growth channel, with posts on automating Cursor, ChatGPT, Codex, Mistral, and OpenClaw via "Zapier MCP." They are also publishing competitive content (OpenClaw alternatives, Zapier MCP vs SDK).

• WorkOS is focused on the security and identity layer: MCP supply chain security (53 mentions), MFA for AI agents, OAuth for agents, and a comprehensive "Everything your team needs to know about MCP in 2026" (111 mentions).
• Descope is publishing on MCP authentication, MCP gateways (98 mentions), MCP identity orchestration (49 mentions), and MCP authentication solutions (83 mentions).
• Cloudflare — Ran a dedicated "Agents Week" in April 2026, publishing its enterprise MCP reference architecture (134 mentions — the single highest-mention post in the dataset).

Tier 2: Infrastructure & Tooling

• Kong is publishing on MCP governance, build-vs-buy for MCP servers (100 mentions), and the Kong Agent Gateway.
• Lunar.dev is emerging as an MCP gateway and operations voice with posts on open-source MCP gateways (74 mentions), CLI vs MCP (34 mentions), and MCP secret management.
• Render produced hosting guides and partnership content (MCP servers guide: 44 mentions).
• Starburst created deep technical content on hosted MCP engineering (84 mentions).
• Railway launched a Remote MCP and Railway Agent CLI (44 mentions).

Tier 3: Domain-Specific Adopters

• Neo4j, Mixpanel, Harness, Portkey, Sanity, Hookdeck, ClickHouse, Pydantic, Weaviate each published MCP server implementations or integration guides specific to their domains.

Key Blog Posts

1. Scaling MCP adoption: Our reference architecture for simpler, safer and cheaper enterprise deployments of MCP — Cloudflare The single most-mentioned post (134 mentions). Cloudflare's enterprise reference architecture for MCP deployment is effectively the blueprint companies are using to plan production rollouts. Published during Agents Week, it signals MCP's transition from developer experimentation to enterprise infrastructure.

2. Everything your team needs to know about MCP in 2026 — WorkOS A comprehensive 111-mention overview that doubles as a state-of-the-union for MCP. WorkOS positions MCP squarely within the identity and access management conversation, reflecting how security concerns have become the dominant sub-theme.

3. Build vs Buy: The Hidden Costs of DIY MCP Servers — Kong With 100 mentions, this post captures the moment enterprises stop experimenting and start making procurement decisions around MCP infrastructure. Kong's framing of MCP servers as infrastructure (not just developer tooling) is significant.

4. The Developer's Guide to MCP Gateways — Descope 98 mentions. MCP gateways have emerged as a critical architectural pattern — a centralized control plane for managing tool access, authentication, and authorization across MCP servers. Descope's guide reflects how quickly this sub-category has matured.

5. Under The Hood of Starburst Galaxy's Hosted MCP — Starburst 84 mentions for a deep engineering dive into what it takes to run MCP as a managed service at scale. This is the kind of implementation detail that signals real production deployment, not just thought leadership.

6. MCP vs CLI: Key Differences for AI Agents — TestMu AI 78 mentions. The MCP-vs-CLI debate has become one of the defining architectural discussions in the agentic AI space. This post captures why MCP's structured protocol approach is winning over traditional CLI wrappers for agent tool access.

7. Per-Tool OAuth Scopes for MCP, Derived from Your Schema — WunderGraph 67 mentions. A technically precise post showing how OAuth scopes can be automatically derived from GraphQL schemas for MCP tools — exactly the kind of fine-grained authorization that enterprises need before deploying MCP at scale.

Competitive Dynamics

The MCP landscape has stratified into several competitive layers:

Protocol-level: MCP is effectively unchallenged as the dominant agent-tool protocol. The Credal post on "Agent Client Protocol vs Model Context Protocol" (18 mentions) acknowledges ACP as an alternative, but the sheer volume of MCP content dwarfs any competitor. MCP has achieved network-effect lock-in.

Gateway/Control Plane: This is the hottest competitive layer. Lunar.dev, Descope, Kong, Cloudflare, and Speakeasy are all vying to be the MCP gateway of choice. Lunar.dev's "Best Open Source MCP Gateways" post (74 mentions) maps the landscape. Kong is positioning its Agent Gateway as the enterprise default. Cloudflare's reference architecture gives it a structural advantage.

Identity & Auth: WorkOS, Descope, Permit.io, Ory, and Speakeasy are competing for the MCP authentication layer. WorkOS is the most prolific publisher, but Descope has the highest-mention individual posts. The security angle is critical — posts about MCP supply chain security, static token failures, and SOC 2/HIPAA compliance for MCP gateways are proliferating.

Integration/Tooling Platforms: Merge and Zapier represent two different approaches. Merge is building systematic MCP connection guides (essentially SEO-driven developer education), while Zapier is positioning its MCP as a no-code agent automation layer. Nango is carving out the "agentic API integrations" niche.

Database/Data Platforms: Starburst, ClickHouse, Neo4j, CockroachDB, Weaviate, and MongoDB are all shipping MCP servers for their platforms. This is becoming table stakes — if your platform doesn't have an MCP server, AI agents can't natively interact with it.