MCP Morning — Mon, Oct 26, 2026

Good morning. Today's picks are tools agents use on ordinary files and apps: a local PDF engine, a read-only bridge into Canvas for students, 70+ tools inside the Unity editor, an Excel server that needs no Excel, and a checker that tells you which AI crawlers can actually reach your site. The story is one developer's evening making his blog easy for agents to read.

Trending & new MCPs

• PaperPilot — A PDF and document toolkit in Rust that runs as an MCP server, a CLI, a browser tool (WASM), a desktop app and a local REST API, all on the same engine. Why it matters: it gives Claude, Cursor or any MCP client merge, split, rotate, compress, text extraction and OCR on PDFs without a cloud call; the README says files never leave your machine and there's no Chromium or C++ runtime. v0.6 also does watermarks, a PII scan and Excel to JSON or CSV; the benchmark table is still marked TODO. 143 points on Hacker News.
• canvas-mcp — A read-only MCP server for Canvas LMS that answers students' questions: what's due this week, what's missing, what you need on the final, what the TA said about your lab. Why it matters: all 26 tools send only GET requests, so it can't submit, post, delete or even mark a message as read, and the README points out that a leaked connector URL only exposes what you could already see. It runs remotely over Streamable HTTP, so it works in web and mobile clients too. Created yesterday; MIT, 115 ⭐ on GitHub.
• Unity-MCP — Connects Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini and other agents to the Unity editor, with 70+ built-in tools for assets, prefabs, packages, scenes and components. Why it matters: besides the editor, the plugin can run inside your compiled game for runtime debugging or LLM-driven NPCs, and any C# method can become a tool with one line. Setup is a .unitypackage or unity-mcp-cli; the CLI route signs you in to ai-game.dev, so read what that account is for before you use it. Apache-2.0, 4,533 ⭐ on GitHub.
• Excel MCP Server — Lets AI clients create, read and edit Excel files with charts, PivotTables, slicers, conditional formatting and formulas, built on openpyxl with no Microsoft Excel needed. Why it matters: its own engine calculates formulas (about 260 functions, which the README says were checked against more than 2,500 formulas recorded from real Excel), so the agent reads real values from files that were never opened in Excel. It can also trace precedents and run Goal Seek. MIT, 4,265 ⭐ on GitHub.
• crawlerpeek — Checks whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and other crawlers can reach a URL: what robots.txt says for each bot, and what the page actually returns to that bot's user agent. Why it matters: a site can allow a bot in robots.txt and still serve it a 403 or a challenge page, and this catches both. It ships as a library, a CLI with --fail-on for CI, a GitHub Action and an MCP server, and its verify command checks whether an IP from your logs really belongs to the crawler it claims to be. No runtime dependencies; MIT, 3 ⭐ on GitHub.

Agent story

Making My Blog Readable By AI Agents (HN) — Jake Marsh writes that a lot of his blog's readers now are agents fetching pages for someone, so he spent an evening on them. Every post now has a markdown copy at the same URL plus .md, and a request with Accept: text/markdown gets markdown from the normal URL, with Vary: Accept so caches don't mix the two and a canonical link plus noindex on the markdown so Google doesn't see duplicates. He added /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, named the big AI crawlers in robots.txt with a Content-Signal line, gave every page JSON-LD and proper preview cards, and pings IndexNow on publish because Bing's index feeds many AI search tools. All of it is static files and a few lines of nginx. 36 points on Hacker News.

Rising this week

Biggest week-over-week download growth in our rankings, skipping three servers we covered in the last week:

1. Hive Intelligence MCP — 1,245 downloads (+973%)
2. Mind Upload — 1,302 (+933%)
3. DechoNet — 1,429 (+793%)
4. Runtime Cloud — 3,550 (+698%)
5. codex-supervisor-mcp — 1,657 (+428%)

npm's public download counts still end on Oct 22, so npm numbers here are the same as over the weekend. Downloads include CI and bot traffic, so treat these as signals, not endorsements. How we rank →

MCP Morning lists servers from public data (the official MCP Registry, GitHub, npm and PyPI). We don't run or test them, so review the code and permissions before you connect one to your agent.

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