Full definition
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 that defines how AI applications connect to external data sources and tools. An MCP server exposes capabilities (search, fetch, query a database) over a standard interface; an MCP-aware AI client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) can discover and use those capabilities.
For the proxy world, MCP matters because several providers now ship MCP servers that let Claude or Cursor pull live data from their APIs without you writing scraper code. Bright Data has an MCP server that exposes Web Unlocker. Apify has one for actor runs. Firecrawl has one for scraping. The trend: less "give me raw HTML", more "give me structured data, on demand, in conversation".
For SEO/AI search: an MCP server makes a provider directly visible to AI agents, which counts toward the new generation of citation/grounding signals separate from traditional SEO.