Welcome to Decodo Blog!

Choosing the best MCP servers matters even more now that MCP has shifted from niche adoption to widespread use, with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google supporting it natively. This guide covers what MCP is, why it matters for real-world AI agents, which 10 MCP servers are currently most useful, and how to safely choose and combine MCPs for your setup.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets an AI model discover and call external tools while it runs. The MCP vs. API question comes up because an API (application programming interface) is a contract developers write code against ahead of time, and both connect software to outside systems at different layers. Here's where each fits.

Agentic web scraping is web scraping where an AI agent decides what to do, rather than following a fixed sequence of steps. It identifies the information it needs and chooses its own actions, such as following a link, opening another page, or extracting specific content. This guide explains how agentic web scraping works and when to use it, along with the best agentic scraping tools in 2026.

Self-healing selectors let a scraper relocate the data it's looking for after a site's HTML changes, instead of breaking and needing a manual fix. Search interest in AI-driven scraping has spiked sharply lately, and open-source tools built around this idea have seen rapid adoption, as site redesigns get more frequent and selector maintenance becomes the real cost of running a scraper.

OpenAI shut down ChatGPT Atlas, its standalone AI browser, on August 9, 2026, less than a year after launch, folding browsing into the main ChatGPT app. That matters beyond the product news: Atlas and Perplexity's Comet showed that an AI agent browsing the web can be indistinguishable from a human using Chrome, a structural shift in detection that survives the shutdown.

ShieldFont is an open-source web font that swaps some of a page's words in the HTML source for different ones and redraws the originals on screen through the font's own rendering rules. The idea is to make the writing harder to use in AI training without permission. In this blog post, we'll tackle how the mechanism works and where it stops.

The difference between TCP and UDP lies in how each protocol handles connections, delivery, ordering, and network overhead. TCP prioritizes reliable, ordered transmission, while UDP favors simplicity and lower latency; the UDP vs. TCP choice is usually a latency-versus-guarantee decision.

The best ISP proxies pair ISP-registered IPs with datacenter hosting. This guide compares 8 providers by price, format, coverage, protocol support, and trial terms. Independent 2026 benchmarks place Decodo in the top 3 for its flexible plans, shared and dedicated formats, and low starting price.

MCP server examples show a real server giving an AI model one capability: reading files, querying a database, or fetching live web data. Without MCP, every connection means more glue code to maintain. This guide groups examples by category: web data, developer tools, productivity, databases, search, and design and project management, with what each does and a task it powers.

Claude MCP is the Model Context Protocol as Claude implements it: a server declares tools, and Claude calls them. Claude Desktop and Claude Code both use it, and each reads a different config file. This guide sets up both clients, then measures cost and hidden failures.

Book scraping is the process of collecting public book data, such as titles, ratings, reviews, metadata, and available text, from online sources. It has taken on new relevance as AI companies buy and destructively scan physical books for training data. For material that already exists online, scraping offers a lower-friction, non-destructive way to collect some of the same kind of human-written data.

Residential and datacenter proxies both act as intermediaries that hide your real IP address, allowing you to access restricted websites and geo-blocked content. However, they differ in IP origin, stability, speed, and how websites perceive them. This residential vs. datacenter proxies guide breaks down their key differences.

The best residential proxies in 2026 combine high success rates, fast response times, large IP pools, flexible rotation, and competitive pricing. We compared 9 providers on independent benchmark data, pricing, pool size, targeting, and session controls to find the best options for different use cases.

Decodo tracks scraping requests across its user base every year. The most scraped websites of 2026 include ChatGPT and Perplexity for the first time. TikTok, Google, Naver, Make.com, Target, Amazon, GitHub, and Stack Overflow round out the list.

Decodo is the top overall pick for 2026, combining flexible shared and dedicated options, accessible pricing, and strong independent performance. In Proxyway's 2026 US benchmark, Decodo's rotating datacenter pool recorded a 99.94% success rate and 0.35-second average response time across 70,000 requests.

MCP and CLI are simply two ways to give AI agents like Claude, Cursor, or your own custom agent access to tools, either through a structured protocol or through the terminal. MCP standardizes how those tools get discovered, authenticated, and returned as clean output. CLIs, on the other hand, cost almost nothing in context, and models already know them from training. So choosing between the two comes down to your context budget, your workflow, and whether you need to share the tool with other agents.

Proxy vs. VPN comes down to scope: a proxy reroutes selected traffic per app or site, while a VPN encrypts your entire device. Both hide your IP, but proxies are usually faster and more flexible. This guide breaks down the key differences and which one fits your use case.

A rank tracker API gives you concrete data on where a page sits in search results for a given keyword, location, and device. This guide walks through how rank trackers work, how to get your requests running, and what you'll realistically pay per tracked keyword.