For publishers
Where do I submit my MCP server?
There are two routes. Directories such as the official MCP Registry, Glama, Smithery and mcpmarket take direct submissions. ARD registries require no submission at all: publish a manifest at /.well-known/ard.json and crawlers find you. Some prominent catalogues, including GitHub's Agent Finder, are curated and have no published submission route.
The two routes
1. Directories that take submissions
| Directory | How to get in |
|---|---|
| Official MCP Registry | Publish through the registry's own publishing flow. It is the largest catalogue of MCP servers in existence. |
| Glama | Indexes public MCP servers and scores them. |
| Smithery | Publish via their CLI. |
| mcpmarket | Submission form. |
2. ARD registries, where you do not submit
ARD inverts the model. Instead of applying to a directory, you publish a manifest on your own domain and registries crawl it. That is the whole mechanism, and it is the reason the specification describes discovery as web-native.
The practical catch is crawl coverage. Registries choose their own frontier, and most only reach large domains, so a small publisher can be perfectly conformant and still be indexed nowhere.
What about GitHub's Agent Finder?
It is curated. An open issue asking how independent publishers get into its catalogue has been unanswered since July 2026. If you are not already inside one of its source sets, there is currently no published route in.
The fastest path in practice
- Publish an ARD manifest at
/.well-known/ard.json. This makes you eligible everywhere at once, and it is the only step nobody can gatekeep. - Publish to the official MCP Registry, which is the largest single catalogue and is mirrored by several others.
- Verify coverage rather than assuming it. Being listed and being returned are different things, and only one of them matters.
Check your own domain. The console fetches what you publish and asks every public registry whether they return you.
Run a free audit