Does it work on Claude's free plan?

Claude's free plan allows one custom connector, so yes, as long as it is your one. Search Analyst's own free plan covers one site.

Can Claude change my Search Console settings?

No. Search Analyst only requests read-only access.

Google Search Console MCP for Claude (hosted, no setup)

Your options

Open-source Search Console MCP servers run on your computer with your own Google Cloud OAuth client or service account. Free, but they only work in desktop clients that run local servers, and they return raw API rows.
A hosted connector such as Search Analyst runs on the web, so it also works in claude.ai in the browser and in ChatGPT, and signs in with Google in one step.

What Claude can then answer

Ten tools. Methods: tool reference.
Tool	What it returns	Ask it
`list_sites`	Your Search Console properties and Bing sites	“Which sites can you see?”
`performance_summary`	Clicks, impressions, CTR and position vs the previous period or last year, with top movers	“How did my site do this month?”
`traffic_drop_diagnosis`	Splits a click change into ranking, demand, click-through and disappeared queries or pages; finds the day it started	“Why did my traffic drop?”
`decaying_pages`	Pages with a sustained click decline over 6 to 26 weeks, with the likely reason	“Which pages are losing clicks?”
`striking_distance_keywords`	Queries at positions 8 to 20, ranked by clicks you would likely gain at position 3	“What keywords am I almost ranking for?”
`keyword_cannibalisation`	Queries where several of your pages split impressions, with a suggested owner page	“Are my pages competing with each other?”
`inspect_url`	Index status, coverage, last crawl, robots.txt, Google's chosen canonical vs yours	“Is this page indexed?”
`bing_query_stats`	Top Bing queries with clicks, impressions, CTR and position vs the period before	“What do people search on Bing to find us?”
`bing_crawl_issues`	4xx, 5xx, DNS, time-out, robots.txt and malware issues Bing found	“What is Bing failing to crawl?”
`submit_indexnow`	Notify Bing and other IndexNow engines of new or changed URLs on your verified site	“Ping Bing about these new pages.”

Set it up

Claude (claude.ai and the desktop app)

Open Customize → Connectors, select + Add → Add custom connector.
Name it Search Analyst, paste https://search.tidewellsoftware.com/mcp and select Continue.
Choose Sign in now. On the Search Analyst page select Continue to Google, pick your Google account and allow View Search Console data for your verified sites.
Turn the connector on in a chat from the + menu and ask, for example, "Why did my traffic drop last month?"

Team and Enterprise: an Owner adds it under Organization settings → Connectors; each member then connects their own Google account.

ChatGPT

On the web, open Plugins (chatgpt.com/plugins), select +, then Add custom MCP server.
Name it Search Analyst, choose Public endpoint, paste https://search.tidewellsoftware.com/mcp, and set Authentication to OAuth.
Accept the custom-server notice, choose Create as a plugin, then sign in with Google when ChatGPT opens the Search Analyst page.
Turn it on in a chat. Every tool except IndexNow submission is marked read-only, so ChatGPT runs them without asking each time.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http search-analyst https://search.tidewellsoftware.com/mcp

Then run /mcp inside Claude Code, choose search-analyst and sign in with Google in the browser.

Cursor

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "search-analyst": { "url": "https://search.tidewellsoftware.com/mcp" }
  }
}

Put this in ~/.cursor/mcp.json (all projects) or .cursor/mcp.json, reload, and sign in when Cursor asks. Clients that can only send headers can use an API key from your account page as Authorization: Bearer <key>.

More detail in the setup guide. Data handling: privacy.

Google Search Console in Claude, without running an MCP server