upkeep-mcp

An MCP server for the recurring checks behind ongoing website maintenance: domains, SSL certificates, uptime, technical SEO and accessibility — all from publicly available information.

Built for people who look after a portfolio of client sites on a retainer, not just a single domain. The goal is to answer one question quickly: what needs attention this week?

Status

Early development, built in public phase by phase. Everything that needs no browser is implemented and useful today.

It also exposes the portfolio://sites resource (the site list, for a client to read without spending a tool call) and the quarterly_report prompt (turns a portfolio run into the report a client actually reads).

Published on npm, so it installs with one command — see Installation. A public instance is also running, for anyone who would rather point a client at a URL than run anything — see The hosted instance.

What it looks like

> Is example.com about to expire?

example.com expires 2027-08-13 (346 days).
Registrar: RESERVED-Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
Nameservers: elliott.ns.cloudflare.com, hera.ns.cloudflare.com.
Resolves: apex yes, www yes. DNSSEC: delegation signed.

> Check the certificate on expired.badssl.com

expired.badssl.com:443 certificate expires 2015-04-12 (-4159 days).
Issued by COMODO RSA Domain Validation Secure Server CA.
Chain does not verify (CERT_HAS_EXPIRED). Negotiated TLSv1.2.
Host matched via *.badssl.com.
Revocation not established: http://ocsp.comodoca.com could not answer: the
responder is not authorised to answer for this certificate.

Needs attention:
- [critical] The certificate expired 4159 days ago.
- [critical] The certificate chain does not verify: CERT_HAS_EXPIRED.

> Check the certificate on revoked.grc.com

revoked.grc.com:443 certificate expires 2026-10-18 (42 days).
Issued by Certera RSA DV SSL CA 2.
Chain verifies. Negotiated TLSv1.2.
Host matched via revoked.grc.com.
Revoked on 2025-09-18.

Needs attention:
- [critical] The certificate was revoked on 2025-09-18; browsers that check
  revocation will refuse the site.

Note what the second one does: the chain verifies. Node performs no revocation lookup of its own, so that certificate completes a handshake and reports as trusted. Only asking its issuer finds the problem.

Every tool also returns structured data alongside the text, so results can be sorted, filtered and fed into a report. Full input and output for each tool is in examples/, and a whole portfolio session — the weekly triage, a drill-down, and what the comparison against the previous run will and will not claim — is in examples/conversation.md.

The tools

domain_check

Input: domain — a bare domain, a full URL, or an internationalised name. A subdomain is reduced to its registrable domain, since that is what a registration belongs to.

Returns the expiry date and days remaining, the registrar and its IANA ID, registry statuses, A/AAAA/NS/MX/TXT/CAA records, whether the apex and www resolve, whether the delegation is signed with DNSSEC, and what the domain's SPF and DMARC records say about who may send email as it.

Email authentication is read from the domain's own DNS — the SPF record at the apex, the DMARC record at _dmarc. A record that is absent is reported as information, because it is a standing improvement rather than something that broke this week. A record that is present and wrong is a warning, because it fails right now: two SPF records make receivers skip SPF entirely, and +all authorises the whole internet to send as the domain.

DKIM is deliberately not reported. A DKIM key lives at <selector>._domainkey, and a selector cannot be discovered — only guessed, one DNS query per guess. That is subdomain enumeration, which this project does not do, so a domain with no DKIM and one whose selector was not guessed are left indistinguishable rather than the second being reported as the first.

Each of the domain's own nameservers is then asked about the zone directly, over TCP port 53 with recursion off, which is the one question a recursive resolver cannot answer: it replies with whatever one server told it and does not say which. That finds a server left in the delegation after a migration — it answers REFUSED, or its own hostname stopped resolving, and every resolver query landing there is slow or fails — and it finds nameservers holding different versions of the zone, which is the "it works for me but not for my colleague" outage.

What is a fault and what is only unestablished are graded apart. Resolvers ask over UDP first and this server can only use TCP, so a nameserver that refuses TCP is not a broken one: sapo.pt's four all refuse it and the domain resolves perfectly. Different serials are info too — github.com runs two providers that do not transfer between them, so four of its nameservers report 1656468023 and four report 1, and nothing is wrong. A hostname that does not resolve, or an answer without authority for the zone, is broken for everybody and is a warning. Pass checkNameservers: false to skip the whole thing — portfolio_report does, because a portfolio would pay this per site and a deployment that cannot open port 53 would grade every site at once as unestablished. docs/adr/0020 records why it speaks DNS by hand and what it deliberately does not check.

ssl_check

Input: domain, optional port (443 by default).

Returns expiry and days remaining, issuer, whether the chain verifies and why not when it does not, which hostnames the certificate covers and via which SAN entry, the negotiated TLS version and cipher, and whether the certificate has been revoked. Expired, self-signed and untrusted certificates are inspected and reported rather than refused — those are the ones worth finding.

Revocation is checked over OCSP. The response a server staples to the handshake is preferred, because it costs no request at all; when there is none, the responder named in the certificate is asked directly. An answer is only believed once its signature verifies against the issuing authority, and only once its CertID is shown to be about the certificate that was actually served — a server serving a revoked certificate alongside a valid response for a different one is otherwise the easy way to fake a clean result.

Many healthy certificates cannot be checked at all: since 2025 the two largest issuers, Let's Encrypt and Google Trust Services, publish no OCSP responder and distribute revocation by CRL. That is reported as an unavailableReason and produces no finding, because it is a decision of the certificate authority and nothing the site owner can act on. A responder that was asked and would not answer is different, and gets one unknown.

uptime_check

Input: url — a full URL, or a bare domain, which is tried over HTTPS.

Returns the status code, response time, every hop of the redirect chain, whether plain HTTP is upgraded to HTTPS, the HSTS policy, and the security headers worth reporting on.

seo_audit

Input: url — the page to audit, plus optional checkLinks (true by default) and maxLinks (25 by default).

Returns title and meta description with their lengths, the heading structure, canonical, lang, viewport, Open Graph, hreflang alternates, the images with no alt attribute, the state of robots.txt and the sitemap, and which internal links are broken.

A gzipped sitemap is unpacked before it is read. Whether it is gzipped is decided by the first two bytes rather than by the file name or the content type, because plenty of files called .xml.gz are not, and plenty that are get labelled text/xml.

The sitemap is then checked against the rules of the protocol, because a file that answers 200 and parses is not the same as a file that works: a root element with no sitemaps.org namespace is dropped whole, an entry on another host is discarded, and one unescaped & makes the document ill-formed XML and costs every entry after it. Each broken rule is reported once with the number of entries that break it and one example, so a mistake repeated across fifty thousand URLs reads as one thing to fix. A rule that only costs a hint — a <lastmod> that is not a W3C Datetime, a <changefreq> outside its seven values — is graded info; one that costs the entry or the file is a warning.