Cowboy MCP 1.7.3: connect Perplexity, Grok and the Gemini app, and ChatGPT connects again

Three more AI apps can now work on your WordPress site: Perplexity, Grok and the Gemini app. They connect the same way Claude and ChatGPT do, with no terminal and no API key. This release also fixes ChatGPT's sign-in, which 1.7.2 broke, and a set of smaller problems found in end-to-end testing.

Perplexity, Grok and the Gemini app

Each app has its own panel on the Connections tab. Click Open Perplexity, Open Grok or Open Gemini: your site link is copied and the app's connector page opens in a new tab. Paste the link, add the connector, and the app opens the sign-in page on your own site. Choose full access, read-only or a custom list of tools, click Approve, and the Connections tab confirms when the app has signed in.

• Perplexity: add it under Customize → Connectors → Custom connector. It needs Perplexity Pro, Max or Enterprise, because the free plan has no custom connectors. On Enterprise, an admin has to allow member connectors first.
• Grok: add it at grok.com/connectors with New Connector → Custom. It works on the free plan as well as SuperGrok and X Premium+. In a chat, type @ to pick your site.
• Gemini app: add it under Settings → Connected Apps → Custom apps. For now Google offers this only on personal Google accounts in the United States, with Gemini set to English. Work and school accounts don't have it yet. The Gemini guide has the full steps.

All three are cloud apps, so they connect from their own servers. Your site needs a public HTTPS address; on a local development site, use a tunnel or a terminal tool instead.

n8n gets its own panel

The Connections tab now has an n8n panel with the MCP Client Tool fields ready to copy. Use an API key as a Bearer header, which works everywhere, or choose OAuth2 and let n8n register itself with your site. n8n cloud is already allowed; for a self-hosted n8n, add its host under Settings → Additional allowed hosts first.

ChatGPT connects again

ChatGPT recently changed how it identifies itself when it signs in, and 1.7.2 rejected the new identity with "the app's identity document on chatgpt.com is invalid". 1.7.3 accepts it. If ChatGPT showed you that error, update the plugin and connect again. Connect ChatGPT walks through the steps.

Fixes

• Checkpoint restores on larger sites. Restoring a database checkpoint no longer runs out of memory.
• Wordfence. The Wordfence tools work again on current Wordfence installs, and the activity report shows readable IP addresses.
• WooCommerce. The customer report lists your top spenders again.
• Cowboy MCP stays on. An agent can no longer deactivate Cowboy MCP and cut off its own connection.
• Connections tab. "Last used" stays accurate after an app's sign-in expires, and reconnecting an app you removed points you to the New connections switch.
• Smaller fixes. MCP protocol conformance (the completions capability, and JSON-RPC errors for malformed requests), no PHP warnings when an agent creates a comment without an author name, and the access-level selector no longer breaks on phones.

Security

• wp_cli refuses commands that would print passwords, salts or keys, and redacts them from any output that does get through.
• Agents can no longer delete Cowboy MCP's own transients, the short-lived data it keeps for things like sign-in.

Also new

wp_search_replace takes an optional post_id, so a replacement can be limited to one post or page instead of the whole database. Thanks to dandry for contributing it (pull request #4).

Update

Update from your WordPress dashboard like any other plugin, or install it from WordPress.org. The full changelog is there too. Step-by-step setup for each app is in the connection guides: Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.