Dynamic MCP Server Selection with OpenAI GPT-4.1 and Contextual AI Reranker

Created by

Jinash Rouniyar

Last update

Last update 14 days ago

PROBLEM

Thousands of MCP Servers exist and many are updated daily, making server selection difficult for LLMs.

Current approaches require manually downloading and configuring servers, limiting flexibility.
When multiple servers are pre-configured, LLMs get overwhelmed and confused about which server to use for specific tasks.

A user query goes to an LLM that decides whether to use MCP servers to fulfill a given query and provides reasoning for its decision.
Next, we fetch MCP Servers from Pulse MCP API and format them as documents for reranking
Now, we use Contextual AI's Reranker to score and rank all MCP Servers based on our query and instructions

Sign up for a free trial of Contextual AI here to find CONTEXTUALAI_API_KEY.
Click on variables option in left panel and add a new environment variable CONTEXTUALAI_API_KEY.
For the baseline model, we have used GPT 4.1 mini, you can find your OpenAI API key here

We use chat trigger to initate the workflow. Feel free to replace it with a webhook or other trigger as required.
We use OpenAI's GPT 4.1 mini as the baseline model and reranker prompt generator. You can swap out this section to use the LLM of your choice.
We fetch 5000 MCP Servers from the PulseMCP directory as a baseline number, feel free to adjust this parameter as required.
We are using Contextual AI's ctxl-rerank-v2-instruct-multilingual reranker model, which can be swapped with any one of the following rerankers:
1. ctxl-rerank-v2-instruct-multilingual
2. ctxl-rerank-v2-instruct-multilingual-mini
3. ctxl-rerank-v1-instruct
You can checkout this blog for more information about rerankers to learn more about them.

Contextual AI Reranker (with full MCP docs): ~$0.035/query
Includes 0.035 for reranking + ~$0.0001 for OpenAI instruction generation.
OpenAI Baseline: ~$0.017/query