How to submit a connector to Claude

To submit a connector to Claude, you send your remote MCP server to Anthropic’s Connectors Directory from the developer portal, answer a review, and then publish the approved listing yourself. This guide walks through each step, from the plan you need to the analytics you get once the connector is live. Along the way I compare it with the ChatGPT process, since most teams list in both, and show where MCP Tower helps: testing your server before you submit, then measuring its traffic once it is published.

Key takeaways:

• Any paid Claude plan can submit (Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise). On Team and Enterprise, an Owner submits.
• Test before you submit. Broken OAuth and unclear tool descriptions are what slow a review down, and MCP Tower checks both.
• You submit at the developer portal, claude.ai/directory/manage, with Submit new, then MCP connector. There is no separate Claude Marketplace submission.
• Anthropic may email you a list of issues ranked by severity. In my experience only critical issues block a submission.
• Approval is not the last step: you must select Publish yourself.
• In my experience, first approval took 3–4 months while updates went through almost immediately.
• After launch, Anthropic’s dashboard shows Claude traffic only, with no link clicks or widget interactions.

Claude Marketplace vs the Claude connectors directory

The Claude Marketplace is the website where people browse plugins, connectors and partner products. The directory is the catalog people browse inside Claude. They draw on the same listings. Anthropic’s publishing guide says so directly: there is no separate Marketplace submission, you submit to the directory.

If you are still deciding whether the listing is worth the effort, read why the Claude Marketplace can be a new growth channel first. This article is about getting the listing done.

Step 1: check the prerequisites to submit

You submit from a claude.ai account, and the listing belongs to the organization you submit from. According to Anthropic’s who can submit section:

• Plan: Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise. Free accounts cannot submit. A Team plan is not required.
• Role: on Pro and Max you submit from your own account. On Team and Enterprise an Owner submits, and on Enterprise an Owner can grant a Directory permission to other members through a custom role.
• Organization: submit from the organization that should own the listing long term.

The server itself has to meet the connector submission requirements:

1. It is remote and reachable over https://. Local servers go into a plugin instead.
2. It uses OAuth 2.0 if tools act on a user’s account, or no authentication for public data.
3. Every tool has a title and a readOnlyHint or destructiveHint annotation.
4. You have tested every tool in Claude as a custom connector.
5. You have a documentation URL, a privacy policy URL, a support contact and an icon.
6. You have a test account with real data for the reviewers.

Missing annotations are the most common thing the portal flags. Fix them on your server before you start, because the tools sync from the live server.

Step 2: test your tools and OAuth before you submit

Anthropic’s review is thorough, and I think prompt injection is the main reason. A connector’s tool names and descriptions go straight into Claude’s context, so a vague or misleading description can steer the model, and a reviewer has to rule that out for every tool. The portal’s compliance step also asks you to acknowledge a prompt injection policy.

That makes it worth fixing what a reviewer would flag before they see it. When you add your server to MCP Tower, its Inspect module validates every tool and its description and gives you recommendations. You can fix them on your server and scan again, or change a tool’s title and description right in Inspect with an override, without waiting for your developers.

Authentication is the other common cause of delay. If a reviewer cannot sign in, they cannot test anything, and the submission waits for you to fix it. MCP Tower signs in to your server the way Claude and ChatGPT do and reports the first place where the flow breaks, with the fix.

Step 3: open the portal and select Submit new

Go to the developer portal. On a Team or Enterprise plan you also reach it from Directory in the Organization settings, which is how I got there. Select Submit new, then choose MCP connector.

If you submitted through Anthropic’s Google Form in summer 2026, check the portal before you assume anything is in progress. In my experience those older submissions were not carried over, and had to be submitted again.

Step 4: submit the connector to Claude

The portal saves your progress in the browser as you go. It asks for ten steps:

Step	What it asks for
Connection	The server’s https:// URL, or one or more URLs if each customer has their own
Tools	Nothing to type: tools, prompts and resources sync from the server and are checked for annotations
Listing	Name, one-liner, description, 1–5 categories, docs and privacy URLs, support contact, icon, slug
Use cases	The main tasks, what users need before they connect, and whether it reads or writes data
Company	Company name, website and a primary contact for review updates
Authentication	Whether sign-in is required and how, plus an OAuth client ID and secret if Anthropic holds it
Data handling	Whose API it is, and whether it touches health data or sponsored content
Test & launch	Test account steps and credentials, and confirmation that you ran every tool yourself
Compliance	Seven policy acknowledgments, all required
Review & submit	A final check, with quality warnings that are shared with the reviewers

Two fields deserve extra care. The URL slug is permanent once published. And in my experience the reviewers work from your use cases and example prompts, so write them as tasks a real user would ask Claude to do: “find last month’s unpaid invoices” tells a reviewer more than “invoice search”.

Step 5: get through Anthropic directory review

After you submit, Anthropic scans the connector for policy compliance. According to the docs, connectors are then listed by default as Community with no action from you, and some get a review from a person who tests each tool against the review criteria. The portal shows the status: Draft, In review, Changes requested, Not approved, Approved or Published.

If the reviewer needs something, Anthropic emails your primary contact. My experience with those emails has been good. They explain each issue clearly and rank it high, medium or low. Only critical issues blocked my submission; the rest were advice I could fix later. A reviewer tests each tool and has to sign in to do it, which is why the checks in Step 2 pay off.

Who to contact about a review decision

For an MCP connector, Anthropic’s docs give [email protected] as the address for escalations, edits they cannot make in the portal, and questions about a decision. Include the listing name, your organization and the status the portal shows. [email protected] is the documented address for plugin bundles, and some developers have written there about connectors too.

Following up helps. Some developers report that they emailed about a pending submission and got approved the same day, so submissions seem to fall through the cracks sometimes. If your status has not moved for a long time, write.

Step 6: select Publish

Approval does not put you in the directory. An Approved status means the review team cleared the listing and it waits for you: someone who can edit the listing has to open it and select Publish. If you edit the listing before you publish, it goes back to draft for another review, so publish first and edit after.

Once published, the connector appears in the directory shared by claude.ai, the desktop and mobile apps, and Cowork.

MCP connector approval time

Anthropic does not publish a review time: “Review time isn’t fixed.” The documented default is an automatic listing as a Community connector; the long waits I have seen came with a review by a person. My first approval took 3–4 months, and other developers report similar waits. Plan for that before you announce a launch date.

Updates are a different story. Listing edits (description, categories, icon, links) show as pending until a reviewer approves them, and the live listing stays up in the meantime. In my experience those approvals came almost immediately. Changing the display name of a published server always triggers a new review.

Changes to your tools on the server side matter too. If you rename a tool or rewrite its description, the live server no longer matches what Anthropic reviewed. Check the directory rules before you change tool texts, including with MCP Tower overrides.

Claude vs OpenAI plugin submission

Most teams submit to both directories. Here is how the two processes compare, from Anthropic’s docs and my own submissions. My guide to the ChatGPT plugin directory covers the OpenAI side step by step.

	Claude connectors directory	ChatGPT plugin directory
Where you submit	Developer portal form at claude.ai/directory/manage	Zip upload at platform.openai.com/plugins
What testers get	Main tasks and example prompts, plus a test account	Positive and negative test cases
First approval	3–4 months in my experience	3+ months in my experience
Updates	Almost immediate in my experience	2–4 weeks in my experience
Going live	You select Publish after approval	See the ChatGPT guide
Usage analytics	Health, tool calls, error rate, latency, usage by tool	None

The biggest practical difference is testing. ChatGPT wants you to spell out what should and should not trigger your tools. Claude asks what users will do and how a reviewer can try it.

What analytics you get after launch

Once the connector is live, the portal’s Overview and Usage tabs show what Anthropic documents as beta metrics: a health badge, directory rank, the number of accounts that used a tool, tool calls and error rate over 30 days, latency by Claude product, and usage for your top 15 tools. That is more than ChatGPT gives you, and it is enough to tell whether the connector works.

It leaves several questions open, especially for product and marketing teams:

• The figures cover Claude traffic only. Calls from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot are not counted, so you cannot compare agents side by side.
• Figures are computed daily, can lag by up to 24 hours, and drop tools with fewer than 5 calls.
• You do not see which links in your tool results users open, or whether a conversation sent anyone to your site.
• If your connector renders an MCP App, clicks and form submissions inside it are not reported.

This is the second place MCP Tower comes in, after the pre-submission checks. MCP Tower fills that gap: you publish its URL instead of your server’s, and every call passes through to your server while it records which agent made it, which tool it called, how long it took and what failed. It also tracks link clicks from tool results and interactions inside widgets, and checks your server’s uptime even when nobody is using it. Because it sits in front of your server, the same dashboard covers Claude, ChatGPT and the other agents.

If you are listing in ChatGPT as well, see why the ChatGPT plugin directory can be a new growth channel for what that traffic is worth.

Where else to submit your MCP server

Claude is not the only directory worth your time. Once your connector passes Anthropic’s review, the same server, the same OAuth setup and the same MCP Tower checks carry over to the other assistants. ChatGPT is covered in How to submit a plugin to ChatGPT. These guides cover the rest:

• How to publish an MCP to Muse
• How to publish an MCP in Perplexity
• How to submit an MCP to Gemini
• How to submit a plugin to Grok, which lists it in Grok Bot and Cursor

To reach the developer catalogs as well, publish the same server to the official MCP Registry: How to publish an MCP server to the MCP Registry.

Summary

1. Check you are on a paid Claude plan and, on Team or Enterprise, that an Owner submits.
2. Make the server remote, annotated, tested in Claude, with a test account ready.
3. Run MCP Tower’s tool validation and OAuth checks, and fix what they report.
4. Submit at claude.ai/directory/manage with Submit new and MCP connector.
5. Answer the reviewer’s email; fix critical issues first.
6. Select Publish once the status is Approved.
7. Write to [email protected] if nothing moves for weeks.

Submitting a connector to Claude takes an afternoon of form filling and, in my experience, months of waiting. Test the server in MCP Tower before you submit so the wait is not wasted on a sign-in bug, and keep it behind MCP Tower after launch to see how agents use it.

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