Connect Yanai to ChatGPT

ChatGPT supports MCP-compatible external tools through its connected tools feature. Connecting Yanai gives ChatGPT access to your personal context ā€” the memory you own, not OpenAI's version of it.

Setup

1. Open ChatGPT Settings

In ChatGPT, navigate to Settings > Connected Tools.

2. Add Yanai

Click "Add Tool" or "Connect a new tool" and enter the Yanai MCP server URL:

https://mcp.yanai.ai

3. Authorize

ChatGPT will redirect you to the Yanai authorization page. Sign in with your Yanai account, review the permissions, and click Authorize.

You'll be redirected back to ChatGPT. Yanai is now connected.

Choosing Your Scope

When authorizing, choose your context scope:

  • Personal ā€” Access to your personal aspects, memories, and knowledge. Best for general conversations, personal projects, and learning.
  • Organization ā€” Access to your organization's shared knowledge, team memories, and collective context. Best for work tasks.

What to Expect

Once connected, ChatGPT will:

  1. Recall your context ā€” Your preferences, projects, expertise, and past decisions inform every response
  2. Learn continuously ā€” New information from your conversations is stored to your Yanai profile, not ChatGPT's memory
  3. Portable across tools ā€” Knowledge learned in ChatGPT is available when you switch to Claude, Cursor, or any other connected tool
  4. You own it ā€” Your context belongs to you. Export it, move it, control who sees it.

Example

Without Yanai:

"Help me write a job description for a backend engineer" ā†’ Generic backend engineer JD

With Yanai:

"Help me write a job description for a backend engineer" ā†’ "Based on your Go + Gin + PostgreSQL stack and your team structure, here's a JD targeting someone who can work on your GraphQL API layer and contribute to the MCP integration work..."

How It Works

Behind the scenes, ChatGPT uses the Yanai MCP tools to:

  1. Search your context (search_context) ā€” Finds relevant memories, aspects, and summaries based on your current topic
  2. Store new knowledge (store_memory) ā€” Captures decisions, preferences, and insights from the conversation back to your Yanai profile

This all happens automatically. You just chat normally.

Pro Tip: Add Custom Instructions

ChatGPT supports Custom Instructions (found in Settings > Personalization > Custom Instructions). Without them, ChatGPT will sometimes forget to store what it learns back to Yanai. Add strong, explicit language:

Yanai is connected via MCP. It is my persistent memory ā€” the single source of truth across all my AI tools. You MUST use it every conversation.

START of every conversation: Call search_context to recall what you know about me and the current topic. Never ask questions Yanai already has answers to.

DURING every conversation: Call store_memory IMMEDIATELY whenever I reveal preferences, decisions, project details, people, goals, opinions, domain knowledge, or any fact worth remembering. Do NOT ask "should I save this?" ā€” just save it silently.

END of every conversation: Call store_memory with mode: "extract" and a summary of our conversation to capture anything you missed.

When in doubt, store it. Storage is cheap; lost context is expensive.

This is the difference between ChatGPT passively reading your context and actively building your memory with every conversation. What it learns here carries to Claude, Cursor, and every other connected tool.

Troubleshooting

Yanai doesn't appear in connected tools

  • Make sure you're on a ChatGPT plan that supports external tool connections
  • Verify the URL is exactly https://mcp.yanai.ai

Authorization loop or failure

  • Clear your browser cookies for yanai.ai and try again
  • Make sure you're logging in with the correct Yanai account

Context seems generic

  • Give it a few conversations. Yanai learns progressively ā€” the more you chat, the better the context becomes.
  • You can also seed context manually through the Yanai web app at yanai.ai