How Skillselion counts 59,343 Claude Code skills
Skillselion, a directory of agent skills and MCP servers, reported 59,343 Claude Code skills and 8,427 MCP servers on 28 July 2026. Its counting rules, collapsing forks, excluding placeholders, publishing the snapshot date, are a working example of how any catalog number should be produced.
By the The AI Tools Index team
This index has argued before that every tool count is a definition wearing a number. Skillselion is a useful case study because it publishes the definition next to the figure: 59,343 skills and 8,427 MCP servers as of 28 July 2026, refreshed daily from source repositories, with the counting rules stated on the page that shows the data.
The three rules that make the number checkable
First, forks that canonicalize to an original are collapsed into it, so one popular skill mirrored fifty times counts once. Second, placeholder entries with no usable content are excluded, so the total is not padded by empty repos. Third, the snapshot date is printed with the data, so a reader in September knows a July figure is a July figure.
Rankings use two different signals by type, and the site explains why: skills are ordered by installs reported by the skills.sh registry, while MCP servers are ordered by GitHub stars, because registries do not report install counts for that type. Where the better signal does not exist, it says so instead of faking one.
What the distribution says
Across the 600 most-installed skills, the published median is 159,314 installs, and 79 percent had a source-repository update within 30 days of the snapshot. The category tree is heavily skewed: AI and agent-building skills alone account for over 20,000 entries, more than triple the frontend cluster. Skill ecosystems, like tool catalogs, are not evenly distributed; they pile up where the workflows are.
Why an index cares
Skills and MCP servers are the layer under the tools this index catalogs: many of the 209 listings here expose one. A reader who wants the tool picks it here; a reader who wants the raw capability inside their own agent finds it there. The two counts describe different strata of the same stack, which is exactly why neither number can stand in for the other.
Disclosure
Skillselion and The AI Tools Index are both products of Ellelion LLC. We chose it as the case study because we can vouch for how its numbers are produced, and that same fact means this is a sibling-product walkthrough, not independent coverage. Screenshots are unedited captures from 28 July 2026.