For retailers
What is MCP?
Model Context Protocol, explained without the jargon.
The short version
MCP is an open protocol that lets AI assistants and agents call external tools and data sources directly, instead of only reading web pages. Rather than an AI trying to scrape and interpret your page and hoping it got the price right, it calls a defined tool and gets exact, structured data back: live price, live stock, on demand. Claude and Claude Code already support it today.
Why it matters to you
This is the step beyond being crawled. Crawling is passive: an AI reads whatever a page happens to say, whenever it last visited. MCP is active: an agent asks a direct question and gets a direct, current answer. When AI shopping agents are built to use MCP as standard, they won't need to guess from a cached page, they'll query your live prices and stock directly. Adoption across consumer AI platforms is still early, most don't call external MCP servers yet, but the standard exists and is moving quickly.
How TrustRails does this for you
We operate a working MCP server today, built on this catalogue, the same protocol Claude and Claude Code use to call tools. It costs you nothing to already be connected, so when the rest of the AI ecosystem catches up, your catalogue is ready rather than starting from scratch.