How Does Crustdata Integrate with AI Agents?

Crustdata connects to AI agents through two access paths: a REST API and an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. Both expose the same underlying data layer — a live graph of people and companies that Crustdata builds by indexing and parsing web pages. If your agent needs to search, enrich, or watch B2B people and company records, you wire it to one of these two interfaces rather than to a static database export.

The two integration paths

The distinction matters for how much plumbing you write. With the REST API, your agent (or the code around it) decides when to call which endpoint and how to shape the response. With MCP, the agent's host discovers Crustdata's capabilities as tools, so the model can select and invoke them without you hand-wiring each call.

What the agent actually gets

Crustdata describes its graph as covering 1B+ people and 200M+ companies, assembled by indexing every web page it can reach and resolving those pages into a single live graph. Three verbs describe what an agent can do against it:

• Search — find people or companies matching criteria.
• Enrich — attach detail to a record the agent already has.
• Watch — track changes over time.

The company frames the outcome in workflow terms: sourcing, selling, and scouting run end to end by agents, and the quality of those flows depends on the data handed to them. Its own illustration makes the gap concrete — a generic agent knows only that "Maya Chen is a staff-level engineer with a strong background," while the same agent with Crustdata data sees her title, prior employer, tenure, departure timing, and current activity. That difference is the product's pitch: the agent's reasoning is only as good as the record it reasons over.

Where this fits in practice

Crustdata positions itself as "the data layer behind modern teams and platforms in sales, recruiting and investing," and the homepage leads with a recruiting example ("Turn your Agent into a world-class recruiter"). So the typical integration is an agent that already has a job to do — source candidates, build a target account list, screen a deal — and needs a live people-and-company feed to do it.

Two practical notes before you commit:

• Verify current coverage and limits against the live docs. The 1B people / 200M companies figures come from the vendor's own site and describe the graph, not your plan's quota. Rate limits, field-level coverage, and freshness per data type are the details that decide whether a given workflow works.
• Check pricing directly. Crustdata links to a pricing page, but the available material doesn't state tiers, free access, or login requirements. Don't assume a free tier or open access — confirm on that page before designing around it.

Choosing between API and MCP

Pick the REST API if you're building the agent loop yourself, need to control call timing and payload shape, or are running enrichment as a backend job rather than inside a conversational agent. Pick MCP if your agent runs in an MCP-compatible host and you'd rather let the model discover and invoke Crustdata's tools than write and maintain the integration glue.

If you're unsure, start with whichever your existing agent stack already supports — both reach the same graph, so the choice is about integration ergonomics, not data access.