A few days ago I was chatting with Chuck Meyer (devrel for Algolia) and I casually mentioned, "It sure would be cool if Algolia had an easy way to turn my search index into an MCP server." He promptly responded, "Of course, you complete and utter dufus, which is why we already have that feature." (Not an exact quote.) This is exactly the kind of thing I love to hear. I’ve been using Algolia for my search here for years and honestly have not paid much attention to the new additions on their platform. That was a mistake. Let me show you how dang easy they made this.

First – what’s Algolia?

Chuck, forgive me, I’m going to do a horrible job summarizing your entire company into a few sentences. Algolia provides search as a service. You create an index (or multiple) that represent what you want to search, whether it be textual content (like this blog) or ecommerce products (perhaps Dungeon Crawler Carl merch). Via multiple ways, you populate this index and keep it up to date (when you create/edit/delete content locally, you make a corresponding edit to your index).

Once the index is created (and tuned, you can do a lot to tune how your index works), you can then search it. My search is just one simple example, but it’s one JavaScript library and a few lines of code.

That’s basically it. Well no, there’s a lot more, but at least for my implementation here, that’s basically it.

Second – what’s MCP?

MCP boils down to "if a person is needing to do some kind of action, an MCP server can tell the AI agent, hey, I handle that, just hand it off to me!" At Webflow, for example (sorry, you lay me off you don’t get links), the MCP server handled API calls to your Webflow site and integrated with Cursor, Claude, and other agents. If you asked something like, "What Webflow sites do I have", because the Webflow MCP server was added to your agent, and authenticated, it could handle doing the appropriate API calls and returning it such that your agent could document the result.

For a documentation site, an MCP server can help you use free form questions about the docs and get responses in your AI agent.

Third – Ok, now what?

To enable it in Algolia, you log in to your dashboard and select the appropriate application (an application can have one or more indexes), and then click Generate AI in the navigation. In the sub nav, you’ll have a section titled "MCP Servers / Public", and then in that UI, just click the "Create Public MCP Server" button.

On that UI, you can select what indexes and tools to enable. I’ve only got one "real" index, so I picked that and gave my server an incredibly useful and informative name:

On the next page, you can select which tools you want enabled. I picked everything, but I’m not using the Recommendation product so I probably should turn that off.

The end result is the URL to your MCP server. Mine is https://0FJBPN4K5D.algolia.net/mcp/1/vMOWpYc9RK6FuHnWxZcoyg/mcp. At this point, you follow your "usual procedure" on adding MCP to your tools. I tested in a few, including Cursor of course.

Actually using it…

Two big use cases come to mind for this:

• Externally, this creates a very powerful way for users to interact with your documentation. Most documentation for technical products already include this, including Algolia’s docs of course. But the target user here is your audience.
• Internally, this could be very powerful. As a content writer, I can already use the existing Algolia search as a quick way to see, "did I blog about X", but with my MCP server, I can ask deeper questions, and even use it to help create new content.

I did some testing related to both of these scenarios, not terribly deep, but enough to be pretty impressed.

In agy, the Antigravity CLI (Google Gemini’s models), I asked:

search Ray’s mcp server for his opinion on React

And the response was near perfect:

"deliberate exclusion" is the name of my Goth band.

In Cursor, I added the MCP server via the app settings and took the approach of the content creator. I asked:

using Ray’s MCP server, what do you recommend for a new blog post?

And here’s what Cursor and my MCP server came back with:

In case you just skimmed, it literally suggested, as the second suggestion, the blog post I’m right now. Great minds, right?

TLDR

You can add an MCP server to Algolia indexes in 5 minutes. Actually less than that – it took me longer to remember what 2FA app I used with their dashboard.

Oh, and like most of Algolia’s products, this falls into their Build tier which is free up to a certain amount of usage, which I’ve never hit. I’ve told Chuck before they are too damn generous with their free tier and thankfully they’ve ignored me.

Let me know what you think – are you using this? Are you using Algolia at all? Leave me a comment below as I’d love to hear from some folks who may already be using this.

Raymond Camden