OpenAI Renames Things, We Get the Support Tickets - MCP.Run.Book

Notes from a smaller business:

Tredict ships the official Tredict ChatGPT Plugin that connects ChatGPT to real endurance sports training data over MCP. Until last week it was called the Tredict ChatGPT App. Not because we renamed anything. OpenAI replaced the app directory with a plugin directory on July 9 and every listing changed its name and its URL.

For those keeping score, ChatGPT plugins launched in 2023, were killed in 2024 in favour of GPTs, GPTs gave way to apps in 2025, and apps are now plugins again. Three renames in three years.

The old directory URLs still resolve, but they don't redirect to the new ones and they carry no canonical tags. Search engines currently see two copies of our listing and get to guess which one is real. We spent months building search presence around the term "ChatGPT app", writing documentation, landing pages and blog posts around it. That term is now officially dead vocabulary, and there was no migration note, no heads-up to the businesses whose products are listed there. You find out because your product page has a different name one morning.

The rename is just the visible part. The connector pipeline itself keeps having problems. Right now there is a thread in the OpenAI developer forum about MCP tool calls being blocked by OpenAI's safety checks before they ever reach the MCP server. Our logs show nothing, because from our side there is nothing. The request dies inside OpenAI's infrastructure. But the user is sitting in a chat watching a tool call fail, so it looks like our MCP server is down, even though the request never reached our server. The support mail goes to us. We then get to explain that the failure happened inside OpenAI's pipeline, where we can neither see it, reproduce it nor fix it.

To be clear, our MCP integration itself is fine. When tool calls arrive at our server, they work, and the same MCP server runs stable with Claude, Mistral and Perplexity every day. But nobody should mistake that for the answer. None of these platforms gives reliability signals either. Anthropic did the same thing two months ago when it renamed apps to connectors. The difference is distribution. OpenAI still reaches far more users than anyone else here, and more reach means more responsibility.

I'm not asking OpenAI for an SLA. I'm asking for signals. A status page that covers plugin connectors, so that when their pipeline drops tool calls I can point users somewhere that isn't my own apology. Redirects when they move URLs. A deprecation policy with dates instead of surprise vocabulary changes. This is table stakes for any platform that wants third parties to build serious things on it, and none of it exists today.

Which leaves the strategy question. How do you commit marketing budget, SEO work and roadmap to a surface that renames itself every eighteen months and fails silently in your name? To be fair, OpenAI is the only platform that has actually reviewed and approved the Tredict integration. Anthropic has not answered our listing request to this day, and Perplexity offers an even larger directory with no application process at all, so there is no relationship to build on either. The protocol keeps us portable, but distribution only exists where a platform engages with third parties, and right now that is OpenAI alone. The one platform that does the work of approving partners should also do the work of keeping the ground under its partners stable.