What 42,270 measured monthly searches for MCP actually contain
We build an MCP gateway. That means we have to answer "where is the demand for MCP tooling" with numbers instead of instinct — and when we finally measured it, the shape of the answer was not what the topic's noise suggests. This is that measurement, with the method attached so anyone can repeat it and disagree with our reading. Why we measured instead of guessing The MCP ecosystem produces a lot…
A recent study measured the search demand for 73 phrases related to the Messaging Compression Protocol (MCP). The 73 phrases yielded a total of 42,270 monthly searches, with the top phrase, "model context protocol," accounting for 28.6% of the total searches. However, the majority of the demand is concentrated in the top three phrases, which make up 47.6% of the total searches. These phrases are not necessarily indicative of demand for specific vendors, but rather for understanding the MCP protocol itself.
The difficulty of ranking for these phrases varies greatly, with the top phrases having a difficulty score of 69 or higher, while the most specific phrases have a difficulty score as low as 12. This suggests that the most promising opportunities for new entrants are not the most searched phrases, but rather the more specific ones that require expertise to answer.
Interestingly, the demand for MCP is highly fragmented, with each phrase having its own unique result page. This is in contrast to typical keyword research, where related phrases tend to cluster together. As a result, creating a single comprehensive pillar page is not effective, and instead, smaller content pieces focused on specific aspects of MCP are needed.
This also means that publishing content in this niche is challenging, as the search Console data showed that even the publisher's own site only received 7 clicks from non-branded searches in the four weeks following the measurement period.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
