# Your website has a new visitor: AI agents

URL: https://momentaj.com/insights/your-website-has-a-new-visitor/
Date: 2026-10-08
Updated: 2026-10-09
Author: Amir Pournasserian, Founder & CEO
Tags: MCP, AI agents, Websites
Based on: MCP servers for websites in 2026: 44 tools, sorted by who runs them, https://pournasserian.com/writing/mcp-servers-for-websites-2026 (published 2026-10-07)

An MCP server for a website lets AI agents search the site, ask it questions and act on it for a person, and who runs that server decides what agents see. A summary of founder Amir Pournasserian's October 2026 survey of 44 tools, and what it means for a business.

Key takeaways:
- Who runs a website's MCP server, the platform, a hosted service, the site owner or the agent's user, decides what agents see and who controls it.
- Wix, Shopify, GitBook and Mintlify sites already have MCP endpoints, so the first step is to check what yours says about you.
- Of 44 website MCP tools surveyed, most owner-run ones are editing tools for the site's own team; NLWeb is the open project built as a public endpoint for visitors' agents.
- MCP discovery for websites has only just started: MCP Server Cards became a final proposal on 6 October 2026 and WebMCP is in a Chrome trial.
- No established website MCP tool yet is run by the site owner, works on any platform, stays in sync, lets the owner choose what is exposed, shows what agents ask and publishes discovery files.

An MCP server for a website lets an AI agent search the site, ask it questions and take actions on it on behalf of a person. For twenty years a website had one kind of visitor: a person with a browser. It now has a second kind, an AI agent acting for a person, and more and more often the agent wants to act: book, order, check a policy. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is how most of those agents will do it, and in the first week of October 2026 our founder, [Amir Pournasserian](https://pournasserian.com), went looking for every service, platform and open-source project that puts an MCP server in front of a website. He found 44 tools and two standards.

The full comparison, with every tool checked against its own documentation on 7 October 2026, is on his site. This note is the business reading of it.

## The question that sorts everything: who runs the server?

An MCP server for a website can be run by four different parties, and that choice decides what an agent can see and who controls it.

| Who runs it | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| **The platform** | Wix, Shopify, GitBook and Mintlify switch one on for every site they host. No setup, but only for sites hosted there. |
| **A hosted service** | You point a service such as Cloudflare AI Search, CustomGPT.ai, SiteSpeakAI, Kapa.ai or Azure AI Search at your site and it hosts the server. Each ties you to its own stack. |
| **You, the site owner** | You run open-source software, a CMS plugin or a docs framework, and you decide what it exposes. |
| **The agent's user** | Someone crawls your site into their own index and serves it to their own agent. You are not involved, and you do not see what is asked. |

Only the last one leaves the owner out entirely. It is also the one that happens by default when you have done nothing.

## Do you already have one?

[Every Wix site](https://dev.wix.com/docs/develop-websites/articles/get-started/ai-agents/about-the-wix-site-mcp) has an MCP endpoint at a fixed address that any visitor's agent can use without authentication: search, business details, and actions such as booking an appointment. [Every Shopify store](https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/storefront-mcp) answers policy questions on one endpoint and moved product search and cart actions to a newer one in 2026. Every published [GitBook](https://gitbook.com/docs/ai-for-your-readers/mcp-servers-for-published-docs) and [Mintlify](https://www.mintlify.com/docs/ai/model-context-protocol) site gets a read-only docs server.

If your site is on one of these platforms, the first question is not whether to build an MCP server. It is what the one you already have is saying about you, and whether that is what you want.

## Most of the owner-run options are not for your visitors

Of the 44 tools, 24 are in the three groups the site owner runs. Fourteen of those serve documentation sites or a CMS's own editorial team: they are editing tools behind a login, built so the site's team can use an agent, not so a visitor's agent can use the site. The project built as a public "ask this site" endpoint that the owner publishes is [NLWeb](https://github.com/nlweb-ai/NLWeb), an MIT-licensed protocol led at Microsoft that builds on the Schema.org data sites already publish. Retrieval platforms and search engines can also serve a site over MCP once you have crawled it into them.

## How will agents find your server?

For an agent to use your server, it has to find it. [MCP Server Cards](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/seps/2127-mcp-server-cards) became a final proposal on 6 October 2026, and [WebMCP](https://webmachinelearning.github.io/webmcp/) is in a Chrome trial. For now, someone usually still has to give the agent the address. That will change, and when it does, sites with a well-designed server will be found and the rest will be crawled.

## What is still missing?

The survey ends with a gap. Nothing established today works on any platform, is run by the site owner, keeps content in sync, lets the owner choose what is exposed, shows what agents ask, and publishes the discovery files. One closed beta pitches it. For most businesses that means the honest options in October 2026 are a platform's built-in server, a hosted service with its trade-offs, or a server built for the purpose.

## What we recommend

1. **Find out what you already expose.** If you are on Wix, Shopify, GitBook or Mintlify, read what the built-in server returns before anyone else does.
2. **Decide who should run it.** If the answers an agent gives about your business matter, the owner-run or purpose-built options are the ones where you hold the controls: what is exposed, who is authenticated, what is logged.
3. **Start from the questions, not the API.** A good server has a few tools that answer what people actually ask an agent, with compact results. That is the design work in our [MCP server service](https://momentaj.com/services/mcp-development/).
4. **Watch discovery.** Server Cards and WebMCP are the signals that agents will start finding sites on their own.

The full research, with all 44 tools and the two standards, is at the link above. Our view of whether a product should have an MCP server at all is in [Should your product have an MCP server? A decision guide](https://momentaj.com/insights/should-your-product-have-an-mcp-server/).