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integration · published 2026-05-05

Claude Desktop + Arenza MCP — full integration walkthrough (5 minutes, May 2026)

Wire mcp.arenza.ai into Claude Desktop or Claude Code in 5 minutes. After install, ask Claude "how do my brand mentions look in ChatGPT vs Perplexity this week?" and it returns real share-of-voice numbers from the Arenza pipeline — no copy-pasting from a dashboard.

If you spend most of your day in Claude (Claude Desktop or Claude Code inside Cursor / VS Code / iTerm), forcing yourself back to a separate Arenza dashboard tab to check brand visibility is friction. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets Claude talk directly to mcp.arenza.ai and pull live data — share of voice, wrong claims, opportunities, prompts — right inside the chat surface you already use.

This walkthrough takes about 5 minutes end to end. If you already have an Arenza account and Claude Desktop installed, skip to "Configure Claude Desktop" below.

What you can ask Claude after the install

  • "What's my brand's share of voice across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Grok this week?"
  • "Show me the top 5 wrong claims AI assistants made about my brand last week — verbatim quote, severity, source LLM."
  • "Which competitor is mentioned most often in Perplexity for the keyword \"best CRM for agencies\"?"
  • "Suggest 10 buyer-perspective prompts for our new product line that we should be tracking."
  • "Generate a canonical-fact article body to fix the wrong-claim finding F-2487 in zh."

Prerequisites

  • Claude Desktop (claude.ai/download — macOS or Windows) OR Claude Code (https://claude.com/product/claude-code).
  • An Arenza enterprise account (contact hello@arenza.ai — onboarding includes MCP server access).
  • An Arenza API token from your portal's /settings/api page — copy it before continuing.

Configure Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop reads its MCP server list from a JSON config file. Open (or create) the file at:

  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

Add the Arenza MCP server entry under "mcpServers":

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arenza": {
      "url": "https://mcp.arenza.ai/rpc",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_ARENZA_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace YOUR_ARENZA_TOKEN with the token from settings/api. Save the file. Quit Claude Desktop completely (Cmd+Q on macOS, not just close window) and reopen — the new MCP server only loads on cold start.

When Claude Desktop reopens, the bottom of the chat input shows a small "tools" icon. Click it: you should see "arenza" in the dropdown with 10 tools (list_brands, get_brand_overview, list_prompts, list_opportunities, suggest_competitors, suggest_prompts, add_competitor, dismiss_competitor, mark_opportunity_done, generate_geo_article).

Configure Claude Code

Claude Code uses a workspace-level .mcp.json file (or your User Settings MCP block). The simplest install:

claude mcp add arenza https://mcp.arenza.ai/rpc \
  --transport http \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_ARENZA_TOKEN"

Or, drop a .mcp.json into your project root for team sharing:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arenza": {
      "url": "https://mcp.arenza.ai/rpc",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ${ARENZA_TOKEN}" }
    }
  }
}

Set ARENZA_TOKEN in your shell environment (export ARENZA_TOKEN=...) so the token never lands in git. Restart Claude Code. Run /mcp in any chat to confirm "arenza" is listed and connected.

Verify with a real prompt

In a fresh chat, paste:

Use the arenza tools to list my brands, then for the first brand call get_brand_overview and tell me the share of voice across every AI platform we track in plain English.

Claude will call list_brands → get_brand_overview, parse the response, and return something like: "Your brand 'Acme Co.' has share of voice 47% in ChatGPT, 22% in Gemini, and 51% in Perplexity. The lowest is Gemini — you're invisible in 78% of Gemini answers about your category."

If you instead see "I cannot connect to the arenza tools" — restart the Claude app, double-check the token didn't have a stray quote/space, and confirm the Bearer prefix is exactly "Bearer " (single space, no extra).

Troubleshooting

  • "Tool not found" → the JSON config has a typo. Validate at https://jsonlint.com.
  • "Unauthorized" → token expired or revoked. Get a fresh one at app.arenza.ai/settings/api.
  • "Rate limited" → Free tier is 100 MCP calls/hour. Pro tier is 1,000/hour. See https://arenza.ai/llms.txt for the full ladder.
  • Tool result is empty → the brand has not been scanned yet. From the dashboard, click "Scan now" or wait for the next weekly scheduled scan.
  • Claude Desktop does not show the "arenza" server → you edited the wrong config file. The right path on macOS includes the literal "Application Support" directory name; not "ApplicationSupport".

OAuth (multi-user setup)

If you are setting up Arenza inside an internal AI agent for multiple users in your team or agency, use OAuth instead of a single shared Bearer token. The Arenza MCP server supports OAuth 2.0 with Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) and PKCE — full spec at https://mcp.arenza.ai/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server.

For agency use specifically: each client brand can be exposed to a different end-user via per-brand OAuth scope, so a junior at the agency only sees the brands they manage.

Companion repo + screenshots

Working config files, the 5 example prompts as separate .md files, and screenshot guidance live in the open-source repo: https://github.com/arenza-ai/arenza-claude-tutorial — clone it, copy the example config, drop in your token, you are running.

Related guides

  • Cursor + Arenza integration: https://arenza.ai/guides/cursor-mcp-arenza-quickstart
  • n8n + Arenza for weekly automation: https://arenza.ai/guides/n8n-geo-automation-weekly-digest
  • Slack alerts when AI misquotes your brand: https://arenza.ai/guides/slack-bot-ai-brand-misquote-alerts
  • Why MCP-native matters for AI visibility tools: https://arenza.ai/guides/mcp-native-ai-visibility-architecture