Your marketing data lives in separate rooms. GA4 knows how many people visited your site. Instagram Insights knows how many people saw your last post. Neither of them knows about the other — so the one question you actually care about, “is the thing I keep posting bringing anyone to my site?”, requires two tabs, two exports, and a spreadsheet.
Windsor.ai MCP is a bridge that puts both sets of numbers inside one Claude conversation. We connected it to our own GA4 property and our own Instagram account, ran real queries against real data, and read the pricing page line by line.
Here’s the setup, the three questions worth asking, what the free plan actually gives you after day 31 — which is not what the headline suggests — and one permission that deserves thirty seconds of thought before you connect anything.
What Windsor.ai MCP actually is
Windsor.ai is not an AI tool that happens to have a chat feature. It’s a data connector — the plumbing category. It pulls from 350+ marketing sources (Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, GA4, Shopify, HubSpot, Instagram, and a long tail of others) and delivers that data to a destination.
For years those destinations were Looker Studio, BigQuery, Google Sheets, Power BI. The MCP server is a newer destination, and the destination is Claude itself.
The practical difference: instead of building a dashboard and then reading it, you ask a question and get an answer. No chart to configure, no field picker, no refresh schedule.
Two things worth knowing before you start:
- It’s in Claude’s official connector directory. No custom connector, no JSON config file, no terminal. That puts it in a different category from tools like Kit or X, where you have to add the server URL by hand.
- It has five core tools — list connectors, list accounts, list fields, list options, get data. Plus write actions on supported ad platforms, which we’ll come back to.
What you need before you start
- A Windsor.ai account — free to create
- At least one data source connected inside Windsor, before you touch Claude
- For Instagram specifically: a Creator or Business account linked to a Facebook Page. That’s Instagram’s API requirement, not Windsor’s — a personal account will not work no matter which bridge you use
- A Claude plan that supports connectors
The setup, step by step
1. Create your Windsor account
Sign up at onboard.windsor.ai. Signing in with Google is the fastest route.
2. Add your first data source
In the onboarding app, choose Add data and pick your source from the catalogue. Each one runs a standard OAuth flow — you’ll be asked to grant access on the platform’s own consent screen, not inside Windsor.
3. Check the preview table — do not skip this
Once a source is connected, Windsor shows a preview of the rows it can pull. Look at it. If the preview is empty, the connection to that platform didn’t take, and Claude will return nothing later.
This is the single most common reason a Windsor MCP setup looks broken when it isn’t. The bridge is fine; the source behind it never authorised properly.
4. Connect Windsor in Claude
Go to Settings → Connectors → Browse connectors, find Windsor.ai, and click Connect. Authorise with the same account you used in step 1. This is where most mismatches happen — if you signed up with one email and authorise with another, Claude connects successfully to an empty workspace.
5. Test the connection
Ask Claude which data sources it can see through Windsor. A working setup names your connected sources and their account IDs. An empty list means step 3 or step 4 needs revisiting.
What we actually asked it
Three questions against live accounts. We picked them deliberately: one that proves the connection is real, one that proves it’s useful, and one that proves why a bridge beats two browser tabs.
Question 1: where is my traffic actually coming from?
A plain-English question about traffic sources over the last 30 days returned a ranked breakdown in a few seconds — organic search, direct, referrals, social, each with session counts.
Two things stood out that we’d have missed skimming a dashboard. Pinterest, which costs us one pin per article, outranked Google organic. And there was a row we had never consciously registered before: claude.ai / ai-assistant. AI assistants now show up as their own referral channel. If you’ve been wondering whether people arrive at your site from inside a chatbot, the answer is yes, in small numbers, and it’s measurable today.
Question 2: which posts are actually working?
Reach per post, broken down by format, over the last two weeks. Our reels landed between 52 and 162 accounts reached. That comparison took one question and no dashboard — and it produced a clear enough signal to change what we publish next month.
This is the honest case for a tool like this. Not that it shows you something secret, but that it lowers the cost of asking from “twenty minutes of exporting” to “one sentence”, which means you actually ask.
Question 3: the one that needs both
“How much of my website traffic came from Instagram, compared to everything else?”
GA4 alone can answer half of that. Instagram Insights alone can’t answer any of it. Asking both sources inside one conversation — and getting the comparison rather than two numbers to reconcile yourself — is the actual reason to connect a bridge.
Most “connect X to Claude” guides stop at question 1. Question 3 is where the value is, and it only exists once you have more than one source connected.
The free plan, honestly
Windsor’s free tier is generous and then it isn’t, and the difference matters enough that we’re putting it in a table.
| First 30 days | Forever Free (day 31 onward) | |
|---|---|---|
| Users | 1 | 1 |
| Data sources | 10 | 1 |
| Accounts | 15 | 1 |
| History available | 30 days | 30 days |
Read that middle column again. The ten-source experience everyone writes about is a trial. What survives permanently is one source, one account.
Which means the exact setup we describe above — GA4 plus Instagram, two sources — cannot run on the permanent free plan. Neither can most useful setups, because the whole point is cross-referencing. Question 3 is a paid feature wearing a free plan’s clothes.
The entry paid tier is $23/month billed monthly ($19 if you pay annually) for three data sources, with month-to-month billing and no annual lock-in. That’s genuinely cheap for the category. It’s just not free, and the pricing page’s headline doesn’t make that obvious.
Two more limits worth knowing before you build a habit around this:
- 30-day history on the free plan. You cannot ask about last quarter. Any “how did this year compare to last” question needs a paid tier.
- The cache refreshes every six hours. “Connect your data to Claude” reads as real-time; it isn’t. If your numbers don’t match what the native dashboard shows right now, this is usually why. There’s a Clear Cache button in the onboarding app when you need current figures.
The permission nobody mentions
Windsor’s own documentation confirms that read and write functions — including pausing campaigns and adjusting budgets — are available on every plan, free included.
That’s a real capability, and for some people it’s the whole appeal: change a budget by asking. It also means that once an ad account is connected, actions with financial consequences are reachable from a chat window.
Nothing here happens without your approval. But the sensible habit is the boring one: connect only the sources you need, don’t connect ad accounts to a bridge you’re using purely for reporting, and read what’s being proposed before you approve it. We wrote up the wider version of this in our guide to MCP security for non-developers.
Common problems, and what they actually mean
- Claude returns nothing at all. Check Windsor’s preview table before anything else. Empty preview, empty answer.
- Field name errors. Windsor’s field IDs are its own, not the platform’s display labels — traffic source in GA4 becomes
session_source_medium, with underscores. Ask Claude to list the available fields for a source first, then ask your question. - Numbers don’t match the native dashboard. Six-hour cache, plus attribution windows that differ between platforms. Small gaps are expected; large gaps mean a source needs reconnecting.
- Instagram isn’t listed as a source. Almost always the account type. Creator or Business, linked to a Facebook Page.
- Connected but the workspace is empty. You authorised Claude with a different email than the one holding your Windsor data.
So is it worth connecting?
Yes, if you have data in more than one platform, you ask “why” questions rather than “what” questions, and you’d rather not build and maintain dashboards you check twice a month.
Probably not, if you only use one platform — connect that platform’s own first-party connector instead, and skip the middle layer. Also not, if you need current-hour numbers, or more than 30 days of history and you’re not willing to pay for it.
For a creator or a small business running a site plus two or three channels, $23/month to stop reconciling dashboards by hand is a defensible trade. Just go in knowing that’s the real price, not zero.
Building your Claude setup properly? We’re putting everything we’ve learned from testing MCP connectors into The Claude MCP Playbook — $19 for the first 20 readers, $29 after. Join the waitlist.
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