Make your MCP server a Grok Bot connector

01How connectors work (documented)

• "Grok Bot supports the same MCP servers, plugins, and skills as Cursor." [1]
• Connectors are installed as plugins from Connect apps in the sidebar: browse, press Add, finish browser sign-in if asked, then type @ in chat to attach the connector [2].
• Installed connectors are account-wide, shared by all of a user's bots, not tied to one [2].
• Users can switch individual plugin tools on or off under Connect apps, Your plugins, Manage plugins and skills [3].
• On teams, Grok Bot inherits the team's Cursor connector policy; there is no separate Grok Bot connector list. OAuth tokens stay on Cursor's connector backend and bots call tools without receiving them [4].

02Custom servers (staff answers, not docs)

Cursor staff on the Cursor forum say there is no settings form; you ask the bot in chat, it confirms the details, and the tools are available from your next message [6]:

Add this MCP server: https://your-app.example.com/mcp

• The endpoint must be a public HTTPS URL using Streamable HTTP or SSE [6].
• Servers on your own machine, stdio or localhost, are not attached; the intended path is remote HTTP/SSE MCP and catalog connectors [7].
• The connection and OAuth discovery run from Cursor's infrastructure, so hosts on a VPN or private DNS fail even when the same URL works in the Cursor IDE [8].

03Getting into the catalog

No Grok Bot-specific MCP store is documented. The Grok Bot Marketplace lists bots (templates), not MCP servers [5], and no public page says which catalog feeds Connect apps or how a third party gets listed [2].

Likely route (our inference, not documented): since Grok Bot supports the same plugins as Cursor [1] and inherits Cursor's connector policy [4], the Cursor Marketplace is the most plausible way in. What Cursor documents about it:

• You apply at cursor.com/marketplace/publish [11], and every plugin is manually reviewed before it is listed [9].
• All Marketplace plugins must be open source, and for now Cursor works directly with plugin authors it trusts, with plans to open up more broadly [10].
• A plugin can bundle MCP servers and skills [9].

04Pick the transport

The MCP spec defines two standard transports, stdio and Streamable HTTP [17]. stdio only works for local clients, so a cloud connector needs Streamable HTTP (staff also mention SSE [6]). What the spec asks of a Streamable HTTP server [17]:

• Expose one MCP endpoint path (for example /mcp) that accepts POST and GET.
• Clients send an Accept header listing both application/json and text/event-stream; the server may answer with plain JSON or open an SSE stream.
• Validate the Origin header on every request to prevent DNS rebinding attacks.
• Optionally issue an Mcp-Session-Id at initialization; clients then send it, plus an MCP-Protocol-Version header, on later requests.

xAI's own Remote MCP tool for the API likewise supports only Streaming HTTP and SSE servers [15].

05Authentication

If your server needs user accounts, the spec's authorization flow is what OAuth-capable clients look for [18]:

• OAuth 2.1, with PKCE.
• Servers must publish OAuth 2.0 Protected Resource Metadata (RFC 9728) and return a WWW-Authenticate header on 401 so clients can find the authorization server.
• Dynamic Client Registration is recommended, so clients can register without a manual step.
• Clients send the resource parameter (RFC 8707); tokens travel in the Authorization header, never in the query string.

Because discovery runs from Cursor's cloud [8], your metadata URLs and authorization server must be public too. Cursor's MCP docs list a web OAuth callback (https://www.cursor.com/agents/mcp/oauth/callback) for providers that need a whitelisted redirect URL or lack Dynamic Client Registration [12]; whether Grok Bot uses that callback is not documented. Our advice: if your tools only read public data, consider skipping auth entirely and rate limiting instead; it removes the most common failure point.

06Design your tools

Each tool has a name, optional title, a description, an inputSchema (JSON Schema), and optionally an outputSchema and annotations such as read-only hints [19]. The spec says servers must validate all tool inputs, implement access controls, rate limit invocations and sanitize outputs [19].

xAI's Remote MCP docs recommend clear server labels and descriptions, filtering to only the tools you need, and HTTPS with authentication for production [15]. Our advice: keep the tool list short and the descriptions specific. An agent picks tools by reading those descriptions.

07Test before you share

Since localhost is unreachable, expose your dev server through a tunnel. xAI documents ngrok and cloudflared for this, notes that localhost and private IPs are rejected, and warns that Cloudflare quick tunnels do not support SSE, while Streamable HTTP works [14].

ngrok http 3000
# or
cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:3000

Then paste the public URL plus your MCP path into the chat prompt from section 2. Our advice: before that, confirm a plain POST of an initialize request returns 200 from a machine outside your network.

08Same server, other clients

• Grok: custom MCP connectors are added at grok.com/connectors via New Connector, Custom; the server must be reachable over the public internet [13]. On Business and Enterprise plans, admins manage connectors in the xAI console [16].
• xAI API: pass server_url, server_label, optional allowed_tools, authorization and headers to the Remote MCP tool [15].
• Claude Code, Cursor, Codex: see the install steps on Claude Code, Cursor and Codex, each linked to its official docs.

09What is not documented

As of 2026-10-15, we found no official public documentation for:

• Adding a custom MCP server to Grok Bot (only forum staff replies exist).
• Which transports Grok Bot accepts (Streamable HTTP vs SSE).
• Grok Bot's OAuth specifics: Dynamic Client Registration, redirect URL, scopes.
• How a third-party server gets into Connect apps, and whether that catalog is the Cursor Marketplace.

If you know of an official page that covers any of these, tell us and we will update the guide.

10Get discovered

Until the catalog route is documented, a custom connector spreads by URL, so being findable matters. Browse the ranked list of hosted connectors to see who you are up against, then list yours.

Plug and Ship is an independent directory. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by xAI, Grok or Cursor. Product names are trademarks of their owners. Details change; check the linked sources for the latest.