What is WebMCP?
I use Netlify a lot nowadays, and on their home page I saw they were running a "WebMCP Challenge". I looked up what WebMCP is, but even after reading about it, it was hard to grasp. So I asked claude to make an interactive visual so I could understand:
In short, it's a technology that makes sense. Right now an AI agent has two ways to use a website, and both are clumsy. It can look at the screen and guess, which means screenshots, hunting for the right button, and breaking the moment you redesign anything. Or the site builds and hosts an MCP server, which every user then has to connect to their AI by hand, bloating the context and burning tokens before anyone has done a thing.
WebMCP seems to be a good solution:
- The page registers each tool with a name, a description, and the inputs it takes. The agent reads that instead of guessing from the screen.
- There is no setup because opening the page is the connection.
- The tools run in the page so they use the login you already have.
- A page only registers the tools for what is on screen so there is less for the AI to hold in context.
- You can see the page changing on your browser while AI is using the tools.
- The browser checks each call, so a site only offers its tools to who it allows.
It doesn't replace MCP. Something with no front end, like a database or an API, still wants a proper MCP server. WebMCP is for the things people normally do by clicking.
It is still early days. It's a draft standard rather than a finished one, Edge ships it today and Chrome has it behind an origin trial, and the API has already changed once this year.