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Crawl Census MCP Server

by taylorsmithgg Your server? Claim it
answering

Crawl Census is answering right now. Last checked 13 min ago. It exposes 7 tools. Last commit 23 Aug 2026.

Ask before you fetch: will this domain serve your crawler, refuse it, or charge it?

Uptime history 26 days of history
26 days agonow
100.0%
Uptime 24h
91 of 91 checks
7
Tools
read from the server
162 ms
Response time
average over 24h
0
Stars
last commit 23 Aug 2026

Nothing serious here today

Today is the operative word: we check Crawl Census every 15 minutes and re-read its code on every release. Watch it and you find out the day that stops being true.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 13 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add crawl-census --transport http https://crawlcensus.com/mcp
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crawl-census": {
      "url": "https://crawlcensus.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.crawl-census]
url = "https://crawlcensus.com/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crawl-census": {
      "url": "https://crawlcensus.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crawl-census": {
      "url": "https://crawlcensus.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 7

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

census
census_facts
Every headline finding from the census as discrete, dated records rather than prose. Each carries its value, unit, denominator, measurement date, the page it comes from and a ready-made citation line, plus the caveats that apply to all of them. Use this when answering a question about how open the web is to AI crawlers: lifting a percentage out of a rendered page loses the denominator and the date, which is what makes the number wrong when it is repeated.
census_stats
Corpus-level statistics: how many measured domains block each AI crawler, mean access score, llms.txt adoption.
agent
agent_profile
What this census measures and publishes about one AI crawler: how often it is disallowed in robots.txt, how often live requests carrying its user agent are refused at the network edge whatever robots.txt says, whether its operator documents it as honouring robots.txt, and where to correct any of that. Intended for the operator of the agent as much as for anyone studying it, so it includes the correction channel and the public page a claim can be disputed against.
crawl
crawl_preflight
Decide whether a crawler may fetch a list of domains before spending requests on them. Works for any crawler token, not only the ones this census tracks: an unrecognised agent is resolved from each domain's stored robots.txt rather than refused. For each domain returns one of: allow (robots permits it and a live request carrying that agent's user agent was served), disallow (robots.txt forbids it), refuse (robots permits it but the edge refused the agent anyway, so the allowance is not real), pay (the origin answered HTTP 402 Payment Required, meaning it will serve this agent on commercial terms), or unknown. The full definition of each, including what it obliges a crawler to do, is published at https://crawlcensus.com/api/v1/verdicts. Built for crawler operators rather than site owners: it prevents wasted fetches against doors that are shut, and flags content an operator is trying to sell rather than withhold.
scan
scan_site
Run a live AI-accessibility audit of a domain: robots.txt policy for every tracked AI crawler, live user-agent probes, JavaScript-free readability, structured data and llms.txt. Returns a score out of 100 with per-check detail.
site
site_report
Return the most recent stored audit for a domain without triggering a new scan. Faster and free of load on the target site.
submit
submit_domains
Queue domains the census has not measured yet so a later crawl_preflight can answer them. This closes the loop crawl_preflight starts: anything it returns as unknown with measurable true is worth submitting, and the reply names any that were already fresh or that this census will never measure, so a caller looping over its own unknowns converges instead of resubmitting the same set. Queueing is a database write rather than a fetch, so the allowance is far higher than scan_site and submitted domains are measured ahead of the ranked backlog.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://crawlcensus.com/mcp streamable-http answering 182 ms 13 min ago

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Crawl Census — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Crawl Census do?
It exposes 7 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: agent_profile, census_facts, census_stats, crawl_preflight, scan_site, site_report and 1 more. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
Is Crawl Census working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 91 of 91 checks got a reply (100.0%), average response time 162 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
How do I connect Crawl Census?
Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does Crawl Census need an API key?
No. Crawl Census completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 7 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is Crawl Census?
It answers our handshake in 162 ms on average, which is faster than 74% of all working MCP servers we measure. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.
Is Crawl Census open source?
We cannot say either way: written in JavaScript and 0 stars on GitHub, but we could not determine the licence, and without one the code is not open source by default.