Add Your Bookmarks to Claude Code via MCP

Here is what the experience looks like once your bookmarks are connected.

You are deep in a debugging session. Halfway through, you remember bookmarking a thread about JavaScript event loop quirks six months ago. Instead of opening X, scrolling through hundreds of saved tweets, and hoping you can find it, you just ask Claude: “Do I have anything saved about the JavaScript event loop?”

Claude calls search_bookmarks("JavaScript event loop") and returns three relevant tweets with full content. You get the answer without leaving your terminal.

That is the whole pitch. If it sounds useful, here is how to set it up.

What is the Model Context Protocol and why does it help?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard developed by Anthropic that lets AI tools connect to external data sources. Instead of copying and pasting content into a chat window, the AI can query live data directly during a conversation.

For a full breakdown of how MCP works and why it matters, read What Is MCP? The Protocol Connecting AI to Your Data. You can also check our MCP glossary entry for a concise definition. The short version: it turns Claude from a tool you talk to into a tool that can reach into your other systems.

ContextBolt exposes four MCP tools over your bookmark collection: semantic search, topic cluster listing, cluster browsing, and recent saves by platform. When you ask Claude a question that touches on your saved content, it calls the right tool automatically. You do not need to learn any commands or mention tools by name.

This is significant for one reason that is easy to underestimate. Most developers have been building a personal knowledge base for years without realising it. Every tweet you bookmarked about system design, every Reddit thread you saved about hiring, every LinkedIn post you flagged about pricing strategy: that is a curated body of knowledge. It just has no interface. MCP gives it one.

What you need before starting

Three things:

1. ContextBolt installed. The free Chrome extension captures your X/Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn bookmarks automatically. Start at contextbolt.com.
2. A Pro subscription. The MCP endpoint is Pro-only (£4/month). Free users get AI tagging and semantic search inside the extension, but external MCP access requires Pro. Pro also includes unlimited bookmarks and encrypted cloud sync.
3. Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf. Any AI coding tool that supports remote MCP servers via HTTP transport works. The setup differs slightly for each one.

One other prerequisite worth flagging: cloud sync must be enabled in the ContextBolt extension settings. The MCP endpoint queries your bookmark data from the cloud. Without sync, the server returns a message saying no data is available. Enable it once and it runs in the background automatically.

Step 1: Get your MCP token

Open the ContextBolt extension and go to Settings. Under Pro Features, you will see your personal MCP token. It looks like a standard UUID.

Copy it. This token authenticates your requests to the ContextBolt MCP server. A few things worth knowing:

• It is separate from your account password and API key.
• If it ever leaks (say, you accidentally commit a config file to a public repo), revoke it immediately from the same Settings page and generate a new one.
• Even if it leaks, the damage is limited. The token only grants read access to your own bookmarks. No PII, no payment details, no write access.

Step 2: Add to Claude Code

Claude Code has a CLI command that handles MCP server registration. Run this in your terminal, replacing YOUR_TOKEN with the token from Step 1:

claude mcp add --transport http bookmarks https://api.contextbolt.app/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN

By default, this stores the server at --scope local, available in your current project. To make it available across every project, add --scope user:

claude mcp add --transport http --scope user bookmarks https://api.contextbolt.app/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN

To verify it worked:

claude mcp list

You should see bookmarks listed with a connected status.

Alternative: edit .mcp.json directly

If you prefer manual config (or want to commit a shared setup to a repo), add this to .mcp.json in your project root:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bookmarks": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://api.contextbolt.app/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN"
    }
  }
}

Note the "type": "http" field. Claude Code requires this for remote HTTP servers. Omitting it will cause the connection to fail.

If you are committing this to a shared or public repo, put your token in an environment variable instead:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bookmarks": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://api.contextbolt.app/mcp/${CONTEXTBOLT_MCP_TOKEN}"
    }
  }
}

Claude Code supports ${VAR} syntax and expands environment variables automatically. See the Claude Code MCP documentation for the full config reference including OAuth and header auth options.

Step 3: Add to Cursor

Open (or create) .cursor/mcp.json in your project root, or the global version at ~/.cursor/mcp.json. Add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bookmarks": {
      "url": "https://api.contextbolt.app/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN"
    }
  }
}

Cursor uses "url" directly with no "type" field needed. Save the file and reload the Cursor window. The bookmarks tools will appear in Cascade automatically.

Remote HTTP server support requires Cursor v0.48.0 or newer. If you are on an older version, use mcp-remote as a bridge:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bookmarks": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-remote", "https://api.contextbolt.app/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN"]
    }
  }
}

Full details in Cursor’s MCP documentation.

Step 4: Add to Windsurf

Windsurf uses a different config file and a different field name for remote URLs. Open:

• macOS / Linux: ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json
• Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.codeium\windsurf\mcp_config.json

Add this under mcpServers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bookmarks": {
      "serverUrl": "https://api.contextbolt.app/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN"
    }
  }
}

The key difference: Windsurf uses "serverUrl" not "url". Using "url" will silently fail. Restart Windsurf after saving the file. Full details at Windsurf’s MCP documentation.

What about Claude Desktop?

The Claude Desktop app (the mac and windows GUI client) does not support remote MCP servers via the claude_desktop_config.json file. That config file only works for local stdio servers that run as a process on your machine.

To connect ContextBolt to Claude Desktop, use the Connectors UI instead. Go to claude.ai/settings, find Connectors, and paste your full ContextBolt MCP endpoint URL (https://api.contextbolt.app/mcp/YOUR_TOKEN). Connections made this way are brokered through Anthropic’s infrastructure rather than running locally on your device.

The four tools and what to ask

Once connected, Claude has access to four tools from your bookmark collection. It chooses which to call based on what you ask. You never need to invoke them manually.

Search is semantic, not keyword-based. If you ask “what do I know about managing a small team?” and your bookmarks contain threads about “headcount planning” and “flat org structures”, they will surface. The search embeds your query using the same vector model as the ContextBolt extension and compares it against stored embeddings of your bookmarks.

You can also filter by platform. “What have I saved about hiring on LinkedIn?” limits results to LinkedIn saves. “Show me my recent Reddit bookmarks” returns only Reddit. The platform parameter accepts twitter, reddit, linkedin, or all.

Real use cases worth trying

A few scenarios where this pays off immediately:

Researching a technical decision. This is where developers get the most value. You are choosing between two approaches and want to know what you have read about them. “Do I have bookmarks on database connection pooling?” surfaces relevant threads you saved months ago and had forgotten about.

Preparing for a conversation. You are about to talk to someone about a topic and want to recall what you know. “What do I have saved about B2B pricing models?” pulls together your saved content before you get on the call.

Recovering a specific source. You remember saving a tweet from someone you follow but cannot recall the details. “Find the bookmark from @something about database indexing” retrieves it with the full text, even if the original tweet has since been deleted from X.

Exploring what you know. “List my topic clusters” gives you a map of your own saved knowledge. It is often surprising how much you have accumulated on a topic without realising it.

That last point is the one worth sitting with. Most developers I know have been bookmarking content for years. The average active user saves somewhere between 200 and 500 items per year. Across three or four years, that is a serious body of curated material. The problem was never a lack of content. It was a lack of interface.

A comparison of setup methods

The most common mistake is using the wrong field name. Claude Code and Cursor use "url". Windsurf uses "serverUrl". Claude Code also requires "type": "http" which Cursor does not. Get these wrong and the connection will fail silently, which is frustrating to debug.

Why this matters more than it first appears

The obvious use case is “search your bookmarks without switching apps.” That is genuinely useful, but it undersells what is actually happening.

When your bookmarks are connected to Claude, your AI assistant has context you have been building for years. Every thread you saved because it was interesting, every post you bookmarked because you knew you would need it later: all of it becomes available in every conversation, without you having to remember it or go looking.

This is the version of a personal knowledge base that most people have been trying to build with Notion databases and elaborate folder systems. The difference is that this one runs without any maintenance. You save things as normal. The extension handles the AI tagging and cloud sync. The MCP endpoint makes it all available inside your tools.

No competitor in this space has an MCP endpoint. Not Dewey, not Readwise, not Pocket. ContextBolt is the only bookmark tool that plugs directly into the Model Context Protocol ecosystem. That is not a minor feature distinction. It is a different category of tool.

ContextBolt is a Chrome extension that captures your X, Reddit, and LinkedIn bookmarks into an AI-powered knowledge base. Free tier includes 150 bookmarks, AI tagging, topic clustering, and semantic search. Pro (£4/month) adds unlimited bookmarks, encrypted cloud sync, and the MCP endpoint covered in this guide.