Asked Thrice

askedthrice-mcp

MCP server for askedthrice.com. Lets anyone's assistant measure whether a brand shows up when buyers ask an AI for a recommendation.

Closed since 2026-10-29. Asked Thrice no longer runs free measurements; the product is a paid scan that needs an account. start_visibility_check returns status: "closed" with the link to askedthrice.com and does not call the API. get_visibility_check still reads measurements started before that date. The sections below describe how it worked while it was open.

Hosted at https://mcp.askedthrice.com/mcp (streamable HTTP). Listed in the official MCP registry as com.askedthrice/askedthrice. The stdio bridge for clients that only launch local commands is the npm package askedthrice-mcp, in npm/.

Full spec: specs/features/geo-13-mcp-server.md in the private llm-rank-tracker repo.

Install

{"mcpServers":{"askedthrice":{"url":"https://mcp.askedthrice.com/mcp"}}}

or, for command-only clients:

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

What it exposes

• start_visibility_check starts the measurement and returns a runId.
• get_visibility_check collects it. Returns running until the providers answer.
• askedthrice://methodology explains how it is measured.

Two tools rather than one because a measurement takes up to two minutes: the audit is 15 to 60 s and the measured map another 15 to 60 s.

What it returns, and what it does not

It returns the measured map: the buyer questions that were asked live and who won each answer. Never the providers' self-report, which is what each model *believes* about the brand. The two numbers drift apart a lot in practice, and the self-report is always the optimistic one; that is why the tool contract does not expose it in any field.

It never returns a 0 to 100 score: a verdict in three bands and counts.

Money

Every free measurement spends askedthrice's API keys, on the order of USD 0.05 to 0.15. Three guards, all covered by tests:

1. One free measurement per domain every 30 days, checked BEFORE the API is called.
2. MCP_MONTHLY_RUN_LIMIT (default 200) as the channel ceiling, separate from the web funnel budget.
3. Rate limiting in prod counts by client identity, not by this server's IP, which rotates on serverless.

Env

Channel usage

npm run stats reads mcp_runs and reports how much of the monthly ceiling is left, who called, which domains were measured and which one currently holds the 30-day quota.

node --env-file <file.env> scripts/stats.mjs

node --env-file scripts/stats.mjs --days 30 --history 180

Needs SUPABASE_URL (or NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL) and SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY. --days is the daily detail, --history how far back it looks; the current month is always included in full, because that number has to match the guard's.

The first thing it prints, when there are any, is the orphaned runs: reserved rows that never got their audit_id. They return "Unknown runId" to the client forever while holding their domain's free quota and counting against the monthly ceiling. Delete them by run_id.

Vercel Web Analytics cannot measure this: it works by injecting a script into HTML, and here there is no HTML and no browser to run it, every request is a JSON-RPC call from an MCP client. It would read zero forever.

Docker (directory checks)

Dockerfile builds the HTTP server and serves it on 0.0.0.0:3001, which is what Glama and similar directories run to verify the server starts and answers introspection. Port and host are read by xmcp.config.ts at build time, so they go as ENV before npm run build, not at docker run. Without SUPABASE_* the run store is in memory: fine for a check, not for serving traffic.

Development

npm run dev     # xmcp dev

npm test # vitest, no network npm run build # xmcp build

Tests run against real fixtures in fixtures/ (already-paid runs from prospecting). None of them touch the network or call a provider.

Publishing a new registry version

server.json is published with mcp-publisher using DNS auth on askedthrice.com. The key lives outside the repo as a PEM; the CLI wants the raw ed25519 seed in hex:

HEX=$(openssl pkey -in <key.pem> -noout -text | sed -n '/^priv:/,/^pub:/p' | grep -v '^priv:\|^pub:' | tr -d ' :\n')

mcp-publisher login dns --domain askedthrice.com --private-key "$HEX" mcp-publisher publish server.json

Bump version in server.json on every publish; the registry rejects a repeat. When the npm package changes version, update packages[0].version too.