Is MCP becoming the common foundation of smart, decentralised search?

Tony, creator of Contexte Tech · October 17, 2026

We search less and less with a list of links, and more and more by asking an AI assistant a question. But where does the answer come from? Often from the model’s memory, frozen at its training date, with no source and no licence. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) changes this: the assistant fetches the information directly from those who publish it.

MCP is an open protocol that lets an AI assistant call tools provided by a server: search, read a resource, fill in a text template. The same server works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code and any assistant that speaks MCP: you write the tool once and it works everywhere.

Launched by Anthropic in November 2024, the protocol was adopted within months by the main assistants and developer tools, then handed over in December 2025 to the Agentic AI Foundation, a foundation of the Linux Foundation. It evolves through dated versions (2024-11-05, 2025-03-26, 2025-06-18, 2025-11-25, 2026-07-28), and a public registry lists the servers.

A classic search engine copies the web into its own index, then ranks what it copied. With MCP, it is the other way round:

Nobody needs to copy everything: search becomes decentralised. A statistics office, a public administration, a laboratory or a small specialised website can answer assistants directly, with up-to-date figures, without going through an intermediate index.

Decentralised search is only worth something if it stays honest. Three things still have to be built, server by server:

The Contexte Tech catalogue (datasets, prompts, contexts and tools for AI, largely built on European public sources) is open to every assistant at:

https://contextetech.com/mcp

No account, no key. In practice:

Add https://contextetech.com/mcp as a connector in your assistant, then ask:

load n8qhje

The assistant loads a dataset for finding the NAF (APE) code of a business activity, built on the official INSEE classification published on data.gouv.fr, and cites its source. The full guide is on the MCP server page.

What if the MCP protocol became the common foundation of smart, decentralised search? MCP does not replace the web: it gives assistants a way in. The more open, sourced and honest servers there are, the more AI search will look like what we expect from it: answers that say where they come from. If you publish data or reference content, now is the right time to open your own server.