Official Brilliant Directories MCP Server — Setup Guide

Universal AI integration for your BD site. Give any AI agent full access to your Brilliant Directories site with one API key.

Manage members, posts (single-image and multi-image), leads, reviews, top and sub categories, email templates, pages (homepage, landing pages), 301 redirects, smart lists, widgets, menus, forms, tags, membership plans, and more — across every resource BD exposes via its REST API.

This guide walks you through connecting your AI of choice (Claude, Cursor, etc.) to your BD site. Pick your AI app below, paste two things, restart. Most setups take under 5 minutes.

⚠️ REQUIREMENTS — Before you start

1. Your BD site URL. Use the full canonical URL exactly as it loads in a browser — include https:// (or http:// if your site has no SSL), include www. if your site uses it, no trailing slash.

   • ✅ https://www.mysite.com (most BD sites)
   • ✅ https://mysite.com (only if your site has no www.)
   • ✅ http://mysite.com (HTTP-only sites — protocol respected)
   • ❌ mysite.com (missing protocol)
   • ❌ https://mysite.com/ (trailing slash)
   • ❌ https://mysite.com if the site actually serves at www.mysite.com — use the form your site canonically responds at

2. Your BD API key.

   BD Admin → Developer Hub → Generate API Key → copy it.

   Full walkthrough: How to Create an API Key.

3. Node.js — only for the Advanced path (see below). Not needed for the Easy path. If you need it, one-time install from nodejs.org (click Get Node.js® to download, then click Windows Installer (.msi) — Mac: macOS Installer — double-click the downloaded file to install, Next through the prompts).

🚨 API PERMISSIONS — DO NOT SKIP THIS

New BD API keys ship locked down — only member read/write is enabled by default.

Every other resource (web pages, forms, menus, tags, email templates, reviews, leads, categories, post types, widgets, etc.) lives behind an "Advanced Endpoints" toggle and returns 403 API Key does not have permission to access this endpoint until you flip it on.

This catches almost every first-time user. If your AI can list members but can't create a page or update a form, stop debugging — it's this.

Turn on Advanced Endpoints:

1. BD Admin → Developer Hub
2. Find your API key in the list → Actions dropdown → Permissions
3. Click the Advanced Endpoints tab
4. Toggle everything ON (or cherry-pick only the resources you'll use — but ALL ON is the fastest way to stop tripping over this)
5. Click Save Permissions

The change is immediate — no key rotation, no AI restart needed. Re-run the failed request and it'll succeed.

Want to stop the AI from deleting anything? Uncheck every delete action under Advanced Endpoints. The AI will still be able to read, create, and update — but any delete* tool call will return 403 instead of wiping data. Good baseline for production sites where the AI shouldn't be trusted with destructive operations.

Why BD locks it down by default: least-privilege. A leaked key with baseline-only permissions can only read/write members on your site, not rewrite your whole directory. Once you've decided which endpoints your agent actually needs, you can pare the permissions back down to just those.

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