Connect Glean MCP to your AI tools

Point Claude Code, Cursor, and Claude Desktop at your Glean MCP endpoint and run one enterprise task from each — same context, three surfaces.

~15 minBeginner

Problem

Your team already lives in Claude Code, Cursor, and Claude Desktop. Connect each to the same Glean remote MCP server and every one of them can search, summarize, and answer from your company's permission-aware knowledge — no per-host reimplementation, no separate index.

Prerequisites

Glean MCP server enabled for your deployment (admin toggle)

At least one MCP host installed (Claude Code, Cursor, or Claude Desktop)

Steps

1

Detect installed hosts

Check for Claude Code, Cursor, and Claude Desktop on this machine.

2

Resolve your Glean backend

Ask for your work email, POST it to https://app.glean.com/config/search, and extract {instance} from the subdomain of the returned queryURL — the same chain cookbook-conventions' auth section uses. The MCP server URL is https://{instance}-be.glean.com/mcp/default.

3

Configure each detected host

--client values: claude-code, cursor, claude-desktop. This is the real, GA, first-party CLI for this job — it handles OAuth with Dynamic Client Registration by default. Don't hand-walk a Configurator URL or ask for an API token.

npx -y @gleanwork/configure-mcp-server remote --url https://{instance}-be.glean.com/mcp/default --client <host>

4

Restart the host app

Cursor and Claude Code pick up the new server on restart; Claude Desktop needs the hammer icon to confirm Glean tools are available.

5

Verify

Per host, ask "Who's on call for payments-service?" and confirm a real, Glean-cited answer.

Take it further

Ask an onboarding question ("explain how payments-service handles retries") right after cloning a repo — no context-switching to search separately.

Compare tool selection across hosts for the same prompt — each host's MCP client decides which Glean tools to call, and they don't always agree.

Ask an incident-investigation question ("what changed in payments-service recently?") to see multi-tool chaining (search + code) in one turn.

Scaffold starter code

Copies a prompt your AI assistant can build from.

At a glance

SurfacesMCP

StatusProduction pattern

Time~15 min

Required scopes

MCP

Code assets

Host config snippets for all three hosts