OFICIAL Planet Labs News

What Is the Planet MCP and How Do I Install and Use It?

What happened
Based on Planet Labs News · Jul 23, 2026

Planet Labs has introduced Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to enable AI clients to interact with its documentation and platform tools via natural language prompts.

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What Is the Planet MCP and How Do I Install and Use It?
Planet Labs News — Planet Labs
Key points
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If you want to ask Planet questions from an AI chat interface or agent, Planet offers Model Context Protocol (MCP) options that give your AI a direct path to Planet resources and platform tools.
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Planet currently offers two MCP options, one focused on documentation answers and one focused on Planet platform actions such as catalog search, image preview, and ordering.
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In practical terms, setup starts with installing the right MCP service, signing in with your Planet credentials, and adding a short server entry to your AI client configuration.
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Once connected, you can get source-based documentation help or run a defined set of platform commands through natural language prompts in your existing workflow.

Planet Labs now offers two Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, one for accessing documentation and another for executing platform actions such as catalog searches, image previews, and order workflows. Users install the appropriate MCP service, authenticate with Planet credentials, and configure their AI client to connect. Once set up, users can query documentation or run approved platform commands through their existing AI workflows without requiring custom integrations for each client. The MCP standard provides a common interface for AI applications like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT to interact with external tools uniformly.

The documentation MCP provides source-based answers from Planet’s documentation, help content, and community knowledge, while the platform MCP enables account-backed actions such as catalog searches, thumbnail previews, and order flows. The choice depends on whether the user needs an explanation or an action. The documentation MCP is hosted by Planet and configured through Planet Ask AI, whereas the platform MCP is installed locally, requiring authentication and runtime setup. This split affects maintenance, as local installs may need environment checks for changes in paths or Python environments.

The platform MCP currently supports a defined beta feature set, including natural language catalog searches, image previews, asset ordering, and feature collection interactions. It is experimental software, and its capabilities may evolve based on testing and user feedback. Users can submit feature requests in Planet Community for future consideration. The documentation MCP remains limited to knowledge sources and does not perform analytical workflows on imagery.

Neither MCP server supports satellite data analysis workflows, which are instead available through Planet’s agentic AI interface at ai.planet.com, currently in beta. This tool combines satellite data, AI-enabled change detection, and public information to deliver geospatial insights via a map-based chat interface. Users can also submit analytics feature requests in Planet Community for potential future development.

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