An agent does not want 17 APIs. It wants to investigate a place. Here is how to give it that.
2026-08-20 · 5 min read
An AI agent is only as good as the ground truth it can reach. Ask one about a company or a property and, on its own, it guesses from stale training data. To answer well, it needs live, connected facts, and a way to pull them mid-task. That is what the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is for, and public records are an ideal thing to serve over it.
The wrong way to give an agent public data is to hand it seventeen separate APIs and expect it to figure out which one holds property data, which holds business filings, and how to join them. That is integration work the model should not be doing.
The right way is a single layer that has already connected the records and resolved the entities, exposed as tools the agent calls directly. Then the agent's job is what it is good at: reasoning over investigate this property, not orchestrating data plumbing.
MCP is the open standard for connecting AI agents to real systems. An MCP server advertises a set of tools with typed inputs and outputs, and the agent calls them as needed. Connect an MCP-native public-records layer and an agent like Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor gains tools to search records, resolve an entity, look up everything at an address, and pull a company's filings, all mid-conversation, with no glue code.
Connecting is a matter of pointing your client at the MCP server's URL. Most clients add a remote MCP server by URL in their connector settings; you authorize once, and the tools appear. From there, you ask in plain language and the agent picks the right tool and returns ground truth. The full setup for Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT is a couple of steps each.
The payoff is that the agent stops guessing. What public records exist for this company, and who owns this parcel, become tool calls against connected data, and the model reasons over what comes back.
No. An MCP-native layer exposes the tools directly, so the agent discovers and calls them. You point your client at the server URL and authorize once.
Any MCP-capable client, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor. Because MCP is an open standard, one server works across all of them.
MCP server · What is an MCP server · Public records for AI agents
Keep reading: How to run public-record due diligence on a company · Permit-based lead generation: finding businesses about to spend · KYB vs KYC: what business verification actually checks · How entity resolution works (and why name-matching fails) · What public records reveal about a commercial property