MCP Server

Plasmate is listed on the official MCP Registry. Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients can discover and install it automatically.

Plasmate's MCP (Model Context Protocol) server lets AI coding assistants browse the web through Plasmate - structured SOM output instead of raw HTML.

Source: plasmate-mcp

Supported Clients

Client Status
Claude Code ✅ Supported
Claude Desktop ✅ Supported
Cursor ✅ Supported
Windsurf ✅ Supported
Any MCP client ✅ Supported

Setup

Claude Code

claude mcp add plasmate -- npx plasmate-mcp

That's it. Claude Code will now have plasmate_fetch, plasmate_navigate, plasmate_click, and plasmate_type tools available.

Claude Desktop

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) or %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json (Windows):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "plasmate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "plasmate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop after editing.

Cursor

Open Settings → MCP Servers → Add:

{
  "plasmate": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": ["-y", "plasmate-mcp"]
  }
}

Windsurf

Add to your Windsurf MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "plasmate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "plasmate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Manual (stdio)

npx plasmate-mcp

The server communicates over stdin/stdout using the MCP JSON-RPC protocol.

Available Tools

Tool Description
plasmate_fetch Stateless page fetch - returns SOM text
plasmate_navigate Open URL in persistent session
plasmate_click Click element by SOM index
plasmate_type Type into input by SOM index

Example: Fetch a page

Use plasmate_fetch to get the contents of https://news.ycombinator.com

The LLM receives structured SOM output (~1,500 tokens) instead of raw HTML (~22,000 tokens).

Example: Multi-step browsing

Navigate to https://github.com, search for "plasmate", and tell me the top result.

The agent uses plasmate_navigate → plasmate_type → plasmate_click in sequence.

Configuration

Environment variables:

Variable Default Description
PLASMATE_BINARY plasmate Path to plasmate binary
PLASMATE_TIMEOUT 30 Request timeout in seconds
PLASMATE_BUDGET - Optional SOM token budget

Why MCP + Plasmate?