The Brief

Model Context Protocol repositories appear at a pace that makes a plain most-starred list stale: the top of that list barely moves, while the interesting projects are the ones climbing right now. MCP Trends was built to show that movement, in the spirit of GitHub trending pages, but limited to one topic and open about how it ranks.

How the Ranking Works

A scheduled job queries the GitHub search API for repositories tagged mcp, model-context-protocol, mcp-server, mcp-client or mcp-servers, and stores one star-count snapshot per day. Daily, weekly and monthly rankings are the difference between today's stars and the snapshot from that far back. A repository created inside the window has no earlier snapshot, so it appears with its current stars and a New badge. Until a full window of history exists, a page says so rather than presenting an estimate as a measurement.

Static Pages for Search Engines

Each view has its own URL, with the full ranking written into the HTML at build time, plus canonical tags, structured data, a sitemap and robots.txt. A small script adds search and a language filter on top, so the pages stay readable and crawlable without JavaScript.

Hosting and Refresh

The site is served as static assets by a Cloudflare Worker on mcp.zaidanlab.dev. A scheduled GitLab pipeline collects the data, commits the new snapshot and deploys, so the repository holds the full star history and no database is involved.

Filtering Copy-Pasted Spam

Young repositories are full of bot-made clones, so the collector drops any description that appears on several repositories which have almost no forks. On a sample of 500 recently created repositories that removed 150; on the 400 most-starred ones it removed none. A repository with 30 or more stars but no forks stays in the list with an Unusual stars marker rather than being hidden, because that pattern also fits genuine projects. Both rules, and how many repositories they removed, are stated on every page.

A Remote MCP Server

The same data is exposed to AI assistants as a read-only MCP server at mcp.zaidanlab.dev/mcp, with tools to fetch a ranking, search repositories and look up one repository. It runs in the same Cloudflare Worker over stateless streamable HTTP, needs no authentication because the data is public, and was checked against the official MCP SDK client.

Limits

Star counts can be inflated, and a sudden jump on an unknown repository deserves scepticism; the ranking measures attention, not quality. The filters are heuristics, so a genuine repository can occasionally be dropped. Only public repositories with the listed topics are covered, and the project is independent of Anthropic and GitHub.