We maintain a public MCP connector in the travel category (walking tours, guided visits, tickets). It was registered after July 8, 2026.
On September 9 it stopped being discoverable from inside ChatGPT conversations, while it is still listed normally in the plugin directory. I have a clean before/after, so I am writing it up in detail in case it helps narrow down the cause.
WHAT WORKED, SEPTEMBER 6-8
On those three days the model found our connector through in-conversation plugin search and offered it to the user.
A representative case. The user writes “book me a free walking tour in Madrid”. The model calls plugin search with the query “travel booking tours Madrid GetYourGuide Viator”, limit 10. It gets back a 10-item list: GetYourGuide, Viator, a hotel plugin, two small travel planners, Vio, Travel 101, Booking, ours, and one more. It then calls suggest with a single plugin id — ours — and the install card renders in the conversation.
That happened on three consecutive days, on two different accounts, and on both the instant and the thinking model. Every time the card rendered correctly, with the right name, icon and summary.
WHAT BROKE, FROM SEPTEMBER 9
From September 9 onward the same searches never return it again. As of today, the directory shows it present: correct name, correct summary, listed as Public, installable, nothing visibly wrong. In-conversation search returns zero results: searching the exact plugin name returns nothing, every single time.
WHAT WE RULED OUT
Not account-specific. Tested on a free account and on a paid account, different sessions, different IPs. Zero in both.
Not model-specific. Tested on the instant model and on the thinking model, and across the effort levels each one offers. Zero in all of them.
Not query-specific. Exact plugin name, generic category phrases, and phrases lifted verbatim from our own plugin description all return nothing.
Not an install or auth problem. The connector installs fine from a direct link and works once installed, which matches the workaround mentioned elsewhere in this forum. The failure is purely discovery.
Not a server problem on our side. The endpoint has been up continuously and is serving other clients normally.
A WIDER SIGNAL, WHICH IS PROBABLY THE USEFUL PART
This does not look like one delisted plugin. On September 6, a generic travel query returned a coherent travel list: GetYourGuide, Viator, Booking, Vio, Travel 101 and several smaller travel planners.
Today the same generic queries return lists where GetYourGuide, Viator and Klook do not appear at all, while unrelated SaaS plugins (CRM, analytics, scheduling tools) do appear for travel phrasing. Searching those brand names directly also returns nothing.
So whatever changed on September 9 seems to have dropped a whole slice of the index rather than a single entry, and the remaining results are noticeably worse matched to the query. If the theory in this forum is right — that an older database snapshot went live and lost everything registered after July 8 — that would explain both the missing entries and the degraded relevance of what is left.
QUESTIONS
- Is this acknowledged, and is there an ETA for re-indexing?
- Is there anything a plugin author should do on their side, or does it have to be fixed upstream?
- If a re-submission is what fixes it, is that safe to do now, or would it risk losing the directory listing we still have?
I would rather not post our plugin id publicly, but I am happy to send it privately to anyone from OpenAI who wants to reproduce this. I can provide exact timestamps and conversation ids for the three days it worked and for the days it stopped.