Funny thing about this post: nobody typed it into the Cantrip dashboard. It got here the same way a customer could get here, by an AI assistant talking to Cantrip directly and asking it to publish a blog post. No browser, no clicking "New Post." That's the actual subject of today's post, so it felt worth saying up front instead of burying it as a footnote.
Cantrip runs an MCP server. If that phrase means nothing to you, here's the short version: MCP is a standard that lets AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor connect to a piece of software and actually do things in it, not just talk about it. Point one of those assistants at Cantrip's MCP server, and it can list your websites, add a page, write a section of content, switch your theme, or publish a post, all from a chat window instead of a dashboard.
To be clear about what this isn't: it's not a chatbot bolted onto Cantrip's UI, and it's not the AI Content Wizard's wand icon (that one writes a paragraph inside a text field, nothing more). This is a separate connection between your Cantrip account and whatever AI assistant you already use, one that can reach across your entire site.
How you'd actually turn it on
It lives under your website's Integrations page, under "AI Assistant (MCP)." Turning it on gives you one URL. What you do with that URL depends on which assistant you use:
- Claude (web or desktop): Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector, paste the URL, authorize.
- ChatGPT: Settings, then Connectors, then Create a custom connector, paste the URL, choose OAuth, authorize.
- Cursor: drop a small JSON snippet with that URL into your MCP config file, reload, approve the prompt on first use.
Every one of those ends the same way: you sign into Cantrip and grant access, the same OAuth flow you'd use to log into any app with your Google account. There's no API key to generate, copy, and inevitably paste into the wrong field. You authorize once, and from then on that assistant can act on your site until you revoke it.
What you'd actually ask it to do
This isn't really a "type a prompt, get a finished website" thing, and if that's what you're picturing, adjust the expectation now. It's closer to having a capable assistant sitting next to your dashboard who can make the exact same changes you could make by clicking around, just faster, and without you hunting for which settings page has the thing you want.
Realistic asks: "Add a Services page with a section for each thing we do." "Write a short About page from this paragraph I'm pasting in." "Switch the site to the Paladin theme and publish it." "What's my current storage usage?" Each of those is a real action against your real site, not a demo. The assistant sees what you have (pages, sections, posts, settings) and can change it, the same way you would, just through conversation instead of forms.
The one honest limit worth knowing
The MCP connection only works through that OAuth login, on purpose. There's no way to hand a bare API token to the hosted MCP endpoint and have it just work; that door is intentionally shut. If you're building your own automation, a script, a cron job, something with no human around to click "authorize", MCP isn't the path. Cantrip's regular REST API is, and it covers the same ground: get a token once, send it in a header, and your script can do anything the MCP tools can do. MCP is for a person talking to an assistant. The API is for code talking to Cantrip directly.
None of this replaces the dashboard. It sits next to it. Some days clicking through a settings page is genuinely faster than describing what you want in a sentence, and that's fine, use whichever one you reach for first. But if you've ever wished you could just tell your website what to do instead of hunting for the right menu, now you can, and you don't need to trust our word for it: this post is the proof.