Tool-Discovery API

Free JSON API for AI agents: describe what you need, get MCP servers ranked by text relevance, Lantern's live MCP check (online, auth required, offline) and Verified status. Sponsored listings never change the order.

Endpoint

GET https://mcplantern.com/api/v1/discover

q

What you need, in plain words (max 300 chars)

category

Optional category name or slug, e.g. dev-tools

limit

1 to 50, default 10

Example: https://mcplantern.com/api/v1/discover?q=send+email&limit=3

Each result

id, name, description, category, url, status, tools_count, auth_required, latency_ms, last_checked_at, verified, score, relevance, page, install. install is a ready mcpServers config block.

Limits

60 requests a minute and 2,000 a day per IP. Over that you get HTTP 429 with Retry-After. CORS is open. Responses cache for 60 seconds.

Ranking

BM25 relevance over name, category and description, times a health factor (online 1.0, auth required 0.85, not yet checked 0.55, offline 0.15), plus a small Verified bonus.

Prefer MCP? Use https://mcplantern.com/mcp (tool search_servers). See also llms.txt.