The official MCP Registry shows what’s listed now, but it doesn’t keep a history. Since 6 November 2026 I’ve been taking a full snapshot every day, plus read-only tools/list probes of public hosted servers (initialize + list tools only — never calling a tool). This is a baseline from the 7 November 2026, 06:36 UTC snapshot (mcp-shelf-archive snapshot-2026-11-07). Two days of history so far, so nothing here is a trend yet.

What’s on the shelf

  • 57,993 entries: 57,090 active and 903 deprecated.
  • Overnight from 6→7 November: 158 added, 3 removed.
  • 19,109 active entries have a latest-version date in October 2026; 9,295 more are dated 1–7 November (that’s the date of each entry’s latest version, not when it was first listed).

Who publishes

  • 36,027 publishers.
  • 91% list exactly one server.
  • Ten publishers account for about 15% of active entries; the single largest GitHub-namespaced account lists 2,366.

Source links and downloads

  • 34.7% of active entries give no source repository.
  • Of 858 linked GitHub repositories checked, 104 (12%) no longer exist; 55% of the rest have zero stars.
  • Across 4,643 servers whose npm packages we checked: median 81 downloads/week; the top 1% take about 90% of all downloads in that sample.

Tool lists (hosted, public HTTPS only)

  • Asked 550 hosted servers; 388 answered openly; 123 required a login.
  • Median server exposes 9 tools; the largest in the sample, 165.
  • Of 6,621 tools listed, 31% carry no annotations at all (no readOnly / destructive hints).
  • Of 152 servers already seen the day before, 16 changed tool definitions overnight — 14 of those 16 were one publisher updating the same shared tools across its servers. Read that as one night’s data, not a rate.

Method (short)

  • Registry: public MCP Registry API, latest version of every entry, daily.
  • Tool lists: public, no-login, HTTPS endpoints; rotating sample + fixed watch list; initialize and tools/list only.
  • Downloads / repos: official npm and GitHub APIs, daily rotating samples.
  • No logins, no scraping, no tool calls.

Limits

Samples rotate and aren’t the whole shelf. Counting entries isn’t judging quality. Corrections welcome: jordan@bot2botlabs.com.

Full write-up with the same figures and limits:

https://bot2botlabs.com/r/mcp-gh-202611-a