Growing Your MCP Server: A Crash Course

Search engines used to answer with data from web pages. AI agents answer with the actual data, straight from MCP servers. When someone asks ChatGPT or Claude about a product, more and more often the answer comes from the product’s own MCP server rather than from a web page, and no web analytics or SEO tool sees it. This course teaches how to grow that channel: get the MCP server published in the agent directories, measure what agents and people do with it, and grow that usage month after month. Three legs, Publish → Measure → Grow, one running example, and by the end a monthly routine your stakeholders can follow.

Who it is for. Marketers, SEO and growth specialists, and product managers who are responsible for their company’s MCP server. If you know search and web analytics, most ideas will feel familiar, and each lesson maps them to what you already know. No code is needed: where a developer has to do something, the lesson ends with a brief you can forward as it is.

How long it takes. Nine lessons of about 10 minutes, so about an hour and a half, each with one task and three questions to check yourself. Free, no sign-up. Your progress is kept in this browser only.

The running example is a dummy MCP server

Gold Keeper, the server you work on in every lesson, is MCP Tower’s own dummy MCP server for a made-up gold dealer, at https://mcp.goldkeeper.net/. The prices are demo prices, nothing is traded, no money moves and it never asks for payment details, so you can connect it to your own ChatGPT or Claude and experiment with it freely.

Intro

What MCP is, why it matters for growth, and what it looks like inside ChatGPT and Claude.

1. What is MCP? A primer on the channel after searchWhat is MCP: the Model Context Protocol explained, how AI agents discover MCP servers, and a dictionary that maps each MCP idea to its search twin. 10 min.

2. Add an MCP server to ChatGPT and ClaudeAdd an MCP server to ChatGPT and as a Claude custom connector, sign in, and see how each host renders an MCP Apps widget, using a safe demo server. 10 min.

Publish

The agent directories, how a listing gets there, and how to prepare a submission once for every catalog.

3. How to get listed in an MCP directoryHow to get listed in an MCP directory: what the ChatGPT and Claude forms ask, why review is strict, how long it takes, and the other MCP catalogs. 10 min.

4. How to submit an MCP server to directoriesHow to submit an MCP server to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other directories: a fact sheet, verification, test accounts, policies, status tracking and uptime. 12 min.

Measure

Who calls which tools, from which agent, whether it works, and what people do after the answer.

5. MCP server analytics: published, now what?MCP server analytics: which agents call which tools, how many people use them, whether usage grows, where errors come from and uptime. 10 min.

6. ChatGPT traffic in GA4: widgets and linksFind ChatGPT traffic in GA4: why web citations carry utm_source=chatgpt.com, why MCP links land as direct, and how to track MCP links and widgets yourself. 10 min.

Grow

Better descriptions, prompts and skills that showcase the server, and one place to run it all.

7. MCP tool descriptions agents understandFind confusing MCP tool descriptions in your usage data, rewrite them like title tags, test one change at a time, and know when to resubmit a listing. 10 min.

8. MCP prompts and skills that promote your serverAdd MCP prompts that show what the server does, publish an Agent Skill for multi-step jobs, tell customers it exists, and choose where to list next from the data. 10 min.

9. Streamline MCP growth with MCP TowerStreamline MCP growth: distribution, tracking, tool changes and skills in one place every stakeholder can see, a one-slide report and a monthly rhythm. 10 min.

Start with lesson 1