@metalift/mcp

Metalift MCP server for AI agents. Exposes scrape, crawl, map, and batch tools over stdio for Cursor, Claude Desktop, and other MCP clients.

What is Metalift?

Metalift Cloud is a hosted web context platform — scrape, crawl, and map sites into LLM-ready markdown for AI agents. This MCP server connects your AI client to the Metalift API.

Get an API key

1. Sign up for Metalift Cloud and verify your email.
2. Complete onboarding and copy your API key from Dashboard → API keys.

New accounts receive 1,000 free credits/month. Set METALIFT_API_KEY in your MCP config (see below). Do not commit keys to git.

Install

Published on npm as @metalift/mcp. Default config uses npx:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "metalift": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@metalift/mcp"],
      "env": {
        "METALIFT_API_URL": "https://api.metalift.ai",
        "METALIFT_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop: paste the same JSON into claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config). See MCP setup — Claude Desktop and examples/claude-mcp.json.

Corporate Windows / SSL inspection: if npx fails with UNABLE_TO_VERIFY_LEAF_SIGNATURE, install locally and use node — see examples/claude-mcp-local.json / cursor-mcp-local.json and MCP setup troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting

Error	Cause	Fix
Failed to acquire MessagePort	Cursor IDE bug on Windows	Reload window, restart Cursor — details
UNABLE_TO_VERIFY_LEAF_SIGNATURE	Corporate SSL inspection blocks npm	Local install + node path — details
401 / 402 at runtime	Auth or billing	Check API key and subscription

Full guide: packages/platform-web/docs/mcp-setup.md.

Web search vs scrape

Search and scrape are separate tools with separate billing:

1. metalift_web_search — returns up to 10 search snippets (2 credits, English by default). Review titles and snippets first.
2. metalift_scrape — fetches page content for URLs you choose (1+ credits per URL). Default response_detail=compact (~16k chars, no link lists). Use standard for full articles or full for raw JSON with all links.

Do not auto-scrape every search result. See Web search for agent workflow examples.

Environment variables

Variable	Description
METALIFT_API_URL	Metalift scrape API base URL (default: https://api.metalift.ai)
METALIFT_API_KEY	Bearer token for authenticated API access

Tools

Tool	Description
metalift_scrape	Scrape a single URL (default: fast direct static markdown, response_detail=compact; use standard / full for more)
metalift_batch_scrape	Scrape multiple URLs (same response_detail; default compact)
metalift_crawl	Crawl a website
metalift_map	Discover site URLs from page HTML links
metalift_sitemap	Fetch XML sitemap URLs (robots.txt / sitemap.xml)
metalift_web_search	Web search — top 10 SERP results (title, url, snippet). 2 credits per search. Does not fetch page content; use metalift_scrape separately for URLs you need
metalift_job_status	Poll async jobs
metalift_list_strategies	List scrape strategies
metalift_seed_session	Store browser session cookies for a domain
metalift_warm_session	Warm WAF/retail cookies
metalift_list_sessions	List stored domain sessions