The MCP Discovery Problem: Why 7,500+ Servers Is Both a Victory and a Warning

The ecosystem is growing. But finding the right server is getting harder, not easier. There is a number that gets thrown around a lot in the MCP ecosystem right now: 20000+. That is roughly how many MCP servers exist as of April 2026. It is an impressive number. A year ago, there were a few dozen. The growth curve looks exactly like npm circa 2012–2015 — exponential, messy, and full of potential. But there is a problem nobody is talking about loudly enough. The discovery problem did not get smal