Comment by muratsu
3 days ago
This puts the burden on the website owner. If I go through the trouble of creating and publishing an MCP server for my website, I assume that through some directory or method I'll be able to communicate that with consumers (browsers & other clients). It would be much more valuable for website owners if you can automate the MCP creation & maintenance.
Pretty much every revolution in how we do things originates from the supplier. When websites became a thing the burden was on businesses to build them. Same with REST APIs. Same with mobile apps. As soon as there’s a competitive advantage to having the new thing, companies will respond if consumers demand it.
Am I going to start to choose products based on their compatibility with WebMCP?
Some may. If it allows you to skip learning how to navigate a complex web app because the AI experience will help navigate for you, you may be drawn to it.
I think with AI tools you can pretty confidently build out an MCP server for your existing website. I plan to have good LLM docs for this very purpose.
For react in particular, lots of the form ecosystem (react hook form) can be directly ported to MCP tools. I am currently working on a zero config react hook form integration.
But yes, MCP-B is more "work" than having the agent use the website like a user. The admission here is that it's not looking like models will be able to reliably do browser automation like humans for a while. Thus, we need to make an effort to build out better tooling for them (at least in the short term)
I think this is the practical way. The website owner (or rather the builder, since if you're running wordpress, we can assume MCP will be part of the package) is already responsible for the human interface across many devices, and also the search engine interface (robots.txt, sitemap.xml, metatags). Having a standard we can use to curate what the AI sees and how it can interact would be hugely beneficial.
There's space for both IMO. The more generic tool that figures it out on it's own, and the streamlined tool that accesses a site's guiderails. There's also the backend service of course which doesn't require the browser or UI, but as he describes this entails complexity around authentication and I would assume discoverability.
I agree with you that platforms like wordpress, shopify etc will likely ship MCP extensions to help with various use cases. Accompanied with a discovery standard similar to llms.txt, I think it will be beneficial too. My only argument is that platforms like this are also the most "templated" designs and it's already easy for AI to navigate them (since dom structure variance is small).
The bigger challenge I think is figuring out how to build MCPs easily for SaaS and other legacy portals. I see some push on the OpenAPI side of things which is promising but requires you to make significant changes to existing apps. Perhaps web frameworks (rails, next, laravel, etc) can agree on a standard.
> it's already easy for AI to navigate them (since dom structure variance is small).
The premise of MCP-B is that it's in fact not easy to reliably navigate websites today with LLMs, if you're just relying on DOM traversal or computer vision.
And when it comes to authenticated and read/write operations, I think you need the reliability and control that comes from something like MCP-B, rather than just trusting the LLM to figure it out.
Both Wordpress and Shopify allow users to heavily customize their front-end, and therefore ship garbage HTML + CSS if they choose to (or don't know any better). I certainly wouldn't want to rely on LLMs parsing arbitrary HTML if I'm trying to automate a purchase or some other activity that involves trust and/or sensitive data.
I was thinking the same. Forward thinking sites might add this, but the vast majority of website owners probably wouldn't be able to figure this out.
Some middle ground where an agent reverse engineers the api as a starting point would be cool, then is promoted to use the "official" mcp api if a site publishes it.