The agent-readiness score

The score answers one question and nothing else: if a customer’s AI assistant arrives at this site and is told to book, quote or enquire, how much of what it needs is actually there?

It is five categories, 20 points each, 100 in total. Each category is capped at 20, so no single check can carry a site, and a category can only earn points for something the scanner positively found. There is no "nothing looked broken" route to a good score.

The three bands #

The five categories #

1. Crawlability and discovery — 20 points #

Before an agent reads a page it checks whether the site has published anything about itself at the addresses agents look at. This category is that check.

2. Structured data — 20 points #

Whether the page tells a machine what this business is, in the format machines already read. With no structured data at all, an agent has to guess the business type, the hours and the address from prose.

3. Action affordances — 20 points #

Is there anything on the page for an agent to do? A booking or quote form, a known booking widget, a clickable phone number, real buttons rather than clickable divs.

Two filters do most of the work here, and both exist because an earlier version of the scanner counted things that were not actions.

A form matching an action keyword is necessary but not sufficient. It is excluded — from the detected actions and from the form-quality score — when it carries a positive signature of being something else: a search box (role="search", a search input, a search/typeahead token in its attributes, or a field named s, q, query, search or keyword), a newsletter signup (a newsletter/subscribe/mailchimp token, or a lone email field, or newsletter wording when every field is an email or a checkbox), or a form with nothing to submit. A genuine enquiry form carrying a newsletter opt-in tick-box is not excluded, and a genuine one-field-plus-submit enquiry form still counts: the floor is structural, never field count alone.

Widget signatures are matched structurally, against URL-bearing attributes only, and each vendor pattern targets that vendor’s booking endpoint rather than its marketing site. A "powered by" credit in a footer, a blog paragraph naming a vendor, or a CRM script tag is not a booking widget. Under the earlier whole-page substring match, a test page that merely named four vendors in prose emitted four booking actions and gained six points.

4. Form quality — 20 points #

Assessed over action forms only. A site’s form quality is not scored on the strength of its property-search box.

5. Agent interface — 20 points #

Whether the site declares what it can do to software, rather than leaving software to infer it from the layout.

Agent-callable is a separate answer, and it is not part of the score #

A site can have a contact form and still be a place no agent can finish a job. So each detected action carries its own verdict, computed from positive evidence only, and it deliberately does not feed the 0–100 number. The score describes a site; agentCallable describes one action.

WebMCP tool declaration, advertised MCP endpoint, ARD catalog, known booking widget,
or a fully machine-completable form (every field labelled and named, an email/tel
reply channel, a real submit control, no CAPTCHA)

What fifteen real sites scored #

Fifteen Sydney service businesses — five trades, five clinics, five real estate agencies — scanned read-only on 25 August 2026. No business is named anywhere on this site.

What the score does not claim #

This section is published because an instrument that hides its error bars is not an instrument. Every item below is recorded in the scanner’s own repository, not discovered here.

• It reads one page, fetched once, and does not run JavaScript. A booking flow two clicks deep scores as if it were not there. That is the correct measurement of what an agent gets on arrival, and it is not a measurement of what the business can do.
• It understates most sites, and we know roughly by how much. Opening the same fifteen sites in a real browser — rendering, waiting for scripts, clicking, following links — reached 28 actions this pass did not see, on 14 of the 15 sites. Source: packages/mapper/benchmark/results.json, comparison.
• A file scan is not a URL scan. Scanning a saved HTML file skips the robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt and catalogue probes entirely, so the same page can score up to about 11 points higher as a live URL than as a fixture. Source: packages/scanner/README.md, "Notes for the fleet".
• It is not a ranking. A category score is a direction; the fix list is the useful part. The scanner is version 0.1 and its known measurement defects are recorded in the repository rather than in a footnote.
• It says nothing about mappability or execution success. Those need a real browser and a sandbox, so the benchmark summary prints n/a for both rather than substituting the detected-action rate as a proxy. The detected-action rate is mappability’s ceiling, not its stand-in.
• A zero in the agent-callable column is a fact about those sites, not a property of the instrument. It is computed from positive evidence, and one site in fifteen did earn it.

How the measurement is made #

npm install
npm run scan -- https://somebusiness.com.au --html report.html --json report.json
npm run scan -- fixtures/bad-plumber.html      # offline fixture mode
npm test                                        # tsc --noEmit, then scoring, callability and publication assertions on 10 fixtures
npm run build:public                            # regenerate publish/public-reports.json from the committed benchmark reports
npm run build:public -- --check                 # fail if that bundle is stale (also asserted by npm test)