Notion ReadOnly

🚀 Read-Only Notion MCP Server

This project implements a read-only Notion API MCP server optimized for performance and efficiency, focusing on querying and retrieving Notion content for AI assistants.

✨ Features

• Read-Only Design: Focuses on data retrieval operations to ensure secure access to Notion content.
• Minimal Toolset: Reduces the number of exposed Notion API tools from 15+ to only 6 basic functions for document analysis.
• Parallel Processing: Improves performance by implementing asynchronous and parallel API requests, significantly reducing response time, especially for retrieving block content.
• Extended Database Access: Adds support for database, page property, and comment retrieval operations.
• Optimized AI Assistants: Drastically reducing the number of tools solves the "too many tools degrade performance" issue in AI assistants like Cursor. These models are typically limited to around 40 tools.

📊 Tool Comparison

Compared to the standard Notion API integration, this read-only implementation exposes far fewer tools, thereby enhancing the performance of AI assistants:

The reduced toolset helps stay within the recommended tool limit for optimized AI assistant performance while still providing all essential functions.

📦 Installation

1. Set up an integration in Notion:

Visit https://www.notion.so/profile/integrations and create a new Internal integration or select an existing one.

Although we limit the scope of the Notion API to read-only operations, there is a non-zero risk of exposing workspace data to LLMs. Security-conscious users may wish to further configure the integration's capabilities.

For example, you can grant only "Read content" access in the "Configuration" tab:

2. Install dependencies

Use the following command to install the required dependencies:

pnpm install

⚙️ Configuration

Adjust the following configuration parameters as needed, located in the config.ts file:

// Network request timeout in seconds
export const TIMEOUT = 30;

// Whether to enable debug logging
export const DEBUG = false;

// Default page size
export const DEFAULT_PAGE_SIZE = 100;

💻 Usage Examples

Basic Usage

Build

pnpm build

Run

pnpm dev

📄 License

MIT

💡 Usage Tip

Modern AI assistants like Cursor and Claude have certain limitations on the number of tools:

• Most models may not respect a total of more than 40 tools.
• Too many tools degrade overall performance and inference capabilities.
• A complex toolset increases response latency and decision-making difficulty.

This read-only implementation addresses these issues by simplifying the Notion API surface while retaining all essential functions. The results are:

• Faster and more reliable responses from AI assistants.
• Improved accuracy when interacting with Notion content.
• Better overall performance through a focused API design.