# All 61 agent readiness checks by dimension

> Every check in rubric v0.7, with the measurement, the reproduction command, and the fix to ship. They are grouped by dimension, with tier and impact.

- Source: /checks
- Site: AgenticWebScore
- Language: English

---
All 61 checks in rubric v0.7, grouped by dimension. Every check has its own page with what is measured, the exact requests the scanner makes, a command you can run yourself, and the artifact to ship.

| Dimension | Weight | Checks | Question |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Protocol Discovery | 25% | 17 | Do you expose your service as a callable tool and an authorisable API? |
| Content Accessibility | 22% | 15 | Is your content genuinely readable as markdown, semantic structure and structured data? |
| Discoverability | 20% | 11 | Can an agent find you, reach the right page and understand what you offer? |
| Bot Access Control | 18% | 8 | Can you tell agent traffic apart by identity? |
| Commerce Protocols | 15% (conditional) | 10 | Which standard do you accept agent-initiated transactions over? |

## Protocol Discovery — 17 checks

MCP server card, A2A agent card, OAuth discovery, OpenAPI, Agent Skills, WebMCP. The layer that lets an agent use you instead of guessing at you.

| Check | Tier | Impact | Maturity | Rationale |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [`mcp-card`](/checks/mcp-card) — MCP server card | Essential | high | Draft | Since MCP 2026-07-28, agents discover tool servers through a published declaration. |
| [`oauth-discovery`](/checks/oauth-discovery) — OAuth discovery documents | Essential | high | Adopted | Required for agents to connect to your authenticated API on their own (RFC 8414 / RFC 9728). |
| [`openapi`](/checks/openapi) — OpenAPI definition | Essential | high | Adopted | A machine-readable contract so an agent can discover your API and generate correct calls. |
| [`pricing-structured`](/checks/pricing-structured) — Structured pricing information | Recommended | high | Adopted | An offer without a price cannot be compared by an agent — you drop out of consideration. |
| [`service-schema`](/checks/service-schema) — Service/product scope machine-readable | Recommended | high | Draft | An agent must be able to answer "what does this site offer, and to whom". |
| [`a2a-card`](/checks/a2a-card) — A2A agent card | Recommended | medium | Draft | A2A v1.0 (Linux Foundation) is the emerging standard for agent-to-agent discovery. Almost no site publishes a card yet, which makes this one of the cheapest places to be early. |
| [`agent-skills`](/checks/agent-skills) — Agent Skills declaration | Recommended | medium | Draft | Offers ready-made capability packages to agent runtimes. |
| [`api-catalog`](/checks/api-catalog) — API catalog | Recommended | medium | Experimental | Lets an agent see which capabilities are callable in a single document (RFC 9727). |
| [`docs`](/checks/docs) — Documentation reachable | Recommended | medium | Adopted | An agent needs documentation to complete an integration on its own. |
| [`rate-limits-declared`](/checks/rate-limits-declared) — Rate limits and quotas documented | Recommended | medium | Experimental | An agent that does not know the quota discovers it by being throttled, halfway through a task it cannot resume. |
| [`sandbox-environment`](/checks/sandbox-environment) — Sandbox or test environment documented | Recommended | medium | Experimental | An agent cannot safely integrate against a production endpoint; a documented sandbox is the difference between a working trial and a support ticket. |
| [`a2a-signed`](/checks/a2a-signed) — Cryptographically signed agent card | Emerging | medium | Draft | A2A v1.0 makes identity verifiable through JWS (RFC 7515). |
| [`auth-md`](/checks/auth-md) — /auth.md agent authentication guide | Emerging | medium | Draft | A guide telling an agent which authentication flow to use. |
| [`contact`](/checks/contact) — Structured contact information | Emerging | medium | Adopted | An agent must know where to reach you before starting a transaction, or when something fails. |
| [`webmcp`](/checks/webmcp) — WebMCP browser tool declaration | Emerging | medium | Experimental | WebMCP lets sites expose tools to in-browser agents. It is the only normative deliverable of the W3C Agentic Web WG. |
| [`ard-manifest`](/checks/ard-manifest) — ARD resource discovery manifest | Emerging | low | Experimental | Cisco/Outshift's Agentic Resource Discovery specification; Lighthouse audits it too. |
| [`status-page`](/checks/status-page) — Service status and changelog feed | Emerging | low | Adopted | An agent should be able to learn about outages and API changes in a machine-readable way. |

## Content Accessibility — 15 checks

Server-side rendering, markdown negotiation, semantic headings, JSON-LD. Adobe measured that 39% of retail product pages cannot be read by a machine.

| Check | Tier | Impact | Maturity | Rationale |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [`jsonld`](/checks/jsonld) — JSON-LD structured data | Essential | critical | Adopted | The entity type becomes unambiguous to a machine. Without authoritative data, an agent answers from whatever it can scrape. |
| [`headings`](/checks/headings) — Semantic heading structure | Essential | high | Adopted | A single H1 and a consistent H2 structure let the content be split correctly. |
| [`meta`](/checks/meta) — Title and summary metadata | Essential | high | Adopted | This is how an agent learns what a page is about without opening it. |
| [`no-js-fallback`](/checks/no-js-fallback) — Content that needs no JavaScript | Essential | high | Adopted | If content is only produced client-side, the page is empty for agents that do not run JavaScript. |
| [`markdown-negotiation`](/checks/markdown-negotiation) — Markdown content negotiation | Recommended | critical | Adopted | Agents can request a markup-free version with "Accept: text/markdown", which cuts token cost. |
| [`faq-schema`](/checks/faq-schema) — FAQ / question-answer schema | Recommended | high | Draft | Question-and-answer content is the type agents quote most. |
| [`licensing-terms`](/checks/licensing-terms) — Reuse and licensing terms declared | Recommended | high | Draft | Declaring ai-train=no without stating a licensing path leaves both the publisher and the agent without an answer they can act on. |
| [`document-formats`](/checks/document-formats) — Documents in machine-readable formats | Recommended | medium | Draft | A PDF that carries no document structure is unreadable to an agent and to a screen reader alike — the same defect, found twice. |
| [`lang`](/checks/lang) — Language declaration and multilingual access | Recommended | medium | Adopted | A wrong language tag makes an agent misread the content. |
| [`summary`](/checks/summary) — Prominent summary block | Recommended | medium | Draft | The llms.txt contract recommends a short summary at the top of every page; agents quote it directly. |
| [`token-efficiency`](/checks/token-efficiency) — Token efficiency (content-to-markup ratio) | Recommended | medium | Draft | A bloated DOM wastes an agent's context window. |
| [`provenance-declared`](/checks/provenance-declared) — Content provenance declared | Emerging | medium | Draft | Author, publication date and update date are what let an agent judge whether a source is current and attributable before it quotes it. |
| [`spa-fallback`](/checks/spa-fallback) — Per-page content separation (no SPA fallback) | Emerging | medium | Experimental | A catch-all route returning the same skeleton for every URL makes pages indistinguishable to an agent. |
| [`breadcrumb`](/checks/breadcrumb) — Breadcrumb / navigation schema | Emerging | low | Draft | Helps an agent make sense of where a page sits in your site. |
| [`viewport`](/checks/viewport) — Responsive markup | Emerging | low | Adopted | Agent browsers mostly run at mobile scale. |

## Discoverability — 11 checks

Machine discovery through robots.txt, sitemaps, DNS and link headers. The cheapest, highest-return layer of agent readiness.

| Check | Tier | Impact | Maturity | Rationale |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [`llms-txt`](/checks/llms-txt) — /llms.txt published and well-structured | Essential | critical | Draft | The most widely adopted contract for making a site legible to agents. In the curated corpus we measured, 46% of sites published one and the average quality score was 37 out of 100 — adoption is not the same as usefulness. |
| [`reachable`](/checks/reachable) — Homepage open to agent access | Essential | critical | Adopted | If an agent cannot read your site, every other check is moot. Cloudflare began blocking AI crawlers by default in 2025, with signed agents routed separately. |
| [`robots-txt`](/checks/robots-txt) — robots.txt with agent directives | Essential | high | Adopted | The front door for agent traffic (RFC 9309). |
| [`sitemap-xml`](/checks/sitemap-xml) — sitemap.xml valid and current | Essential | high | Adopted | The primary URL discovery source for agent crawlers. |
| [`agents-md`](/checks/agents-md) — AGENTS.md with the required sections | Recommended | high | Draft | The instruction file for coding and operations agents. It fails more often than any other check in the curated corpus we measured, and the usual reason is not a missing file but a file without the sections an agent needs. |
| [`content-signal`](/checks/content-signal) — Content-Signal usage signals | Recommended | high | Draft | Declares how your content may be used, inside robots.txt. Cloudflare included this in its readiness checks. |
| [`canonical`](/checks/canonical) — Canonical and hreflang discipline | Recommended | medium | Adopted | An agent needs one consistent URL per important page. |
| [`llms-full`](/checks/llms-full) — /llms-full.txt expanded context | Recommended | low | Draft | Lets an agent take in the full context in a single request instead of walking the site step by step. |
| [`dns-aid`](/checks/dns-aid) — DNS-AID discovery record | Emerging | medium | Experimental | Lets agents read discovery information over DNS without an HTTP round trip. Cloudflare added it to its readiness checklist. |
| [`link-headers`](/checks/link-headers) — Discovery via Link response headers | Emerging | medium | Adopted | RFC 8288 Link headers let an agent find your discovery resources without parsing HTML. |
| [`sitemap-md`](/checks/sitemap-md) — /sitemap.md markdown site map | Emerging | low | Draft | Lets an agent read your site structure as markdown in a single file. Adoption is still very low, so this is an early-mover advantage. |

## Bot Access Control — 8 checks

Cryptographic agent verification, content usage signals and an explicit permission model. Being blocked by IP is not a policy.

| Check | Tier | Impact | Maturity | Rationale |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [`agent-permissions`](/checks/agent-permissions) — Agent permission model (agent-permissions.json) | Essential | critical | Experimental | Declares which actions an agent may take, which are refused, and which need a person. It is the difference between a policy and a wish: in the curated corpus we measured, roughly one site in a hundred publishes one. |
| [`webbotauth`](/checks/webbotauth) — Web Bot Auth key directory | Essential | critical | Draft | RFC 9421 with Ed25519: the mechanism that lets a site verify which agent is calling rather than guessing from a user-agent string. Adoption in the curated corpus we measured is around one site in a hundred. |
| [`ai-policy`](/checks/ai-policy) — AI usage policy page | Essential | high | Adopted | States the rules agents must follow and reduces licensing ambiguity. |
| [`ai-rules`](/checks/ai-rules) — Named AI bot rules in robots.txt | Essential | high | Draft | Naming agent crawlers explicitly is the first step to being visible in agent traffic. |
| [`bot-page`](/checks/bot-page) — Crawler and agent policy page | Recommended | medium | Adopted | Explains which agents are permitted and how they are verified. |
| [`security-txt`](/checks/security-txt) — security.txt (RFC 9116) | Recommended | low | Adopted | Provides a responsible disclosure channel for agent-related security incidents. |
| [`ai-txt`](/checks/ai-txt) — /ai.txt access declaration | Emerging | low | Draft | Some agent ecosystems read an /ai.txt contract alongside robots.txt. |
| [`crawl-delay`](/checks/crawl-delay) — Crawl rate declaration | Emerging | low | Adopted | Cloudflare's Verified Bots policy drops AI crawlers that ignore crawl-delay. |

## Commerce Protocols — 10 checks

ACP, AP2, x402, UCP/MPP, product schema and machine-readable returns. Excluded from the denominator unless the site shows a commercial signal.

| Check | Tier | Impact | Maturity | Rationale |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [`product-schema`](/checks/product-schema) — Product/catalog schema | Essential | critical | Adopted | Product data is the most valuable and the least machine-readable: price, availability and returns are usually rendered for a person to read and never declared for a machine to parse. |
| [`agent-purchase`](/checks/agent-purchase) — Agent purchase policy | Recommended | high | Draft | Liability is the open question in agent commerce, and it is a policy decision rather than a technical one: a site that accepts an agent purchase has to decide who carries the cost when the agent is wrong, and publish that decision where an agent can read it. |
| [`inventory-freshness`](/checks/inventory-freshness) — Inventory and price freshness | Recommended | high | Adopted | An agent that cannot tell whether an item is in stock — or when a price was last valid — will quote a stale offer to a buyer, or refuse to quote at all. |
| [`payment-protocols`](/checks/payment-protocols) — Agent payment standard support (AP2/ACP/x402/UCP) | Recommended | high | Draft | The least-implemented surface in the rubric. Accepting an agent payment means choosing a standard and changing a checkout, which is a business decision most sites have not made yet. |
| [`shipping-costs`](/checks/shipping-costs) — Shipping cost and delivery declared | Recommended | high | Adopted | A purchase agent that cannot compute the delivered total cannot complete a checkout, and returns to the merchant without it. |
| [`booking-action`](/checks/booking-action) — Machine-readable booking action | Recommended | medium | Draft | For a service business the agent's task is to book, not to browse — a declared action is what turns a contact page into a completed job. |
| [`returns`](/checks/returns) — Return and shipping terms machine-readable | Recommended | medium | Adopted | An agent must verify return terms before making a purchase decision. |
| [`seller-identity`](/checks/seller-identity) — Seller identity declared | Recommended | medium | Adopted | On a marketplace an offer is meaningless without knowing who is selling and who is the merchant of record, because that is who the agent has a contract with. |
| [`ucp-manifest`](/checks/ucp-manifest) — UCP manifest (/.well-known/ucp) | Emerging | medium | Draft | Google and Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol; lets a merchant declare checkout capabilities at transaction time. |
| [`agent-analytics`](/checks/agent-analytics) — Agent traffic measurement | Emerging | low | Draft | If agent traffic is not measured separately, the channel's return is invisible and never funded. |