MCP, plainly — ctrlsignal
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MCP, plainly

Published May 04, 2026

Model Context Protocol is the new way AI assistants plug into the tools you already use. Here's what it means if your tool is a website.

What MCP actually is

MCP — Model Context Protocol — is a small open standard that lets an AI assistant (Claude, Cursor, your IDE, your phone) talk to outside tools in a uniform way. Think USB-C for AI: one shape, lots of devices.

Before MCP, every assistant rolled its own integration spec and every tool maker had to build the same connector four times. After MCP, a tool exposes one server and any compliant assistant can use it.

What that has to do with a website

Your website is a tool. It captures leads, takes bookings, lists prices, shows opening hours. Today you log into ctrlsignal to change those things. With MCP, you'd ask the assistant you already use to do them for you, and the assistant would call into ctrlsignal directly.

  • "Add a winter promo banner to the home page until July."
  • "Read me the leads from the last week, sorted by source."
  • "Push the new ones I haven't followed up to HubSpot."
  • "Take 15 minutes off Tuesday afternoon — I have a doctor's appointment."

These are the things people want to do but don't, because the path is "open the laptop, find the dashboard, remember where the toggle lives." MCP collapses that to one sentence.

What it isn't

MCP isn't a replacement for the editor. The editor is still where you steer the look, lay sections out, pick photos. MCP is for the dozens of small administrative actions that don't deserve a UI visit — the ones you postpone because they aren't worth the context switch.

It's also not magic on the privacy side. An assistant calling our MCP server has to authenticate as you, see only your account's data, and respect your plan limits. We treat MCP traffic the same way we treat the mobile app: an authenticated client, scoped to one account, with an audit trail.

Where we are

We're building an MCP server for ctrlsignal now. Read-only first (leads, pages, bookings), then writes (publish a draft, configure a HubSpot push, open a booking slot). The next post in this series goes through what's in the first cut and how we picked it.

Ready to try it? Start building with ctrlsignal →