MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is an agreed way for an AI assistant to read data out of another product, so the assistant can fetch what it needs itself instead of you pasting screenshots into a chat window.
How it works, roughly
A product that supports MCP publishes a set of tools, each of which does one thing and returns data. The assistant is told which tools exist and decides which to call to answer your question. You never call them yourself; you ask a question in ordinary language and the assistant works out what it needs.
The point of a standard is that neither side has to be built for the other. Any assistant that speaks MCP can talk to any product that does.
Why it matters for SEO specifically
SEO advice without data is worthless, and until now the data lived in a dashboard only you could read. Ask any assistant how to improve your SEO and it has no idea where you rank, what you nearly rank for, or what your Search Console has been trying to tell you, so it gives everyone the same eight bullet points.
Connected to real measurements, the same assistant answers a different class of question: which keyword sits in position eleven with enough demand to be worth a week, whether last month was a Google update or something you did, what to write next and by when.
What to check before connecting anything
Handing an assistant a connection to a business system deserves a moment of care. The questions worth asking any provider: can it change anything, can it spend money, and what happens to the data.
Our answers, for the avoidance of doubt: the connector has no access to your website at all, no tool on it can trigger paid data collection, and of its twenty tools the only two that write add a dated note to your own charts and update your business context document.
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Agent readiness
Agent readiness is a score for how well AI systems can find, fetch and make sense of your website. It covers discoverability, crawler access, machine-readable content and agent capabilities, and it is the first thing to check when you are missing from AI answers.
Rank tracking
Rank tracking records where your website appears in search results for chosen keywords, checked on a schedule so you can see movement over time. It answers where you are, and it is no longer sufficient on its own to explain what that is worth.
Share of voice
Share of voice is your visibility across a whole keyword set, weighted by how much each keyword is searched. It shows how much of the available attention in your market you hold, and who holds the rest.
AEO
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It is the work of getting your business named and cited when an AI system answers a question, rather than merely ranking on a page of links. The name is new; a good deal of the work is not.