The purpose of Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) is to enable each IPv6 router to discover the presence of multicast listeners (that is, nodes wishing to receive multicast packets) on its directly attached links, and to discover specifically which multicast addresses are of interest to those neighboring nodes. This information is then provided to whichever multicast routing protocol is being used by the router, in order to ensure that multicast packets are delivered to all links where there are interested receivers.

MLD is an asymmetric protocol, specifying different behaviors for multicast listeners and for routers. For those multicast addresses to which a router itself is listening, the router performs both parts of the protocol, including responding to its own messages.

If a router has more than one interface to the same link, it need perform the router part of MLD over only one of those interfaces. Listeners, on the other hand, must perform the listener part of MLD on all interfaces from which an application or upper-layer protocol has requested reception of multicast packets.