DocsBuild / Standards: WebMCP, MCP, ARD

Standards: WebMCP, MCP, ARD

Before an agent reads your page, it checks whether your site has published what it can do. There are three places it looks, and the honest answer today is that almost no service business publishes to any of them.

A catalogue at a known address

A small file at /.well-known/ard.json, found via a rel="ard" link, listing what the business offers and how to act on it. Agent Readiness Discovery, published as a discovery standard in June 2026. The predecessor path, /.well-known/ai-catalog.json, was renamed; we still serve it, for registries built against the original name.

Tools declared by the page

The page itself tells the browser what it can do, so an agent using that browser can call it. WebMCP, from Google and Microsoft. It lives and dies with the open tab.

A permanent endpoint

A connection an agent can open any time, whether or not anyone has the site open. The Model Context Protocol. This is the one that keeps working at 2am.

The three places it looks

The Action GraphThe one list every one of these formats is generated from, Frontlatch publishes to all three from it, once a site is on Gateway.

  1. MCPStable · protocol revision 2026-07-28tools/list · tools/callPersistent tools: one tool per action, with the graph’s inputs as the tool’s schema, served to an agent that asks what it can call.
  2. WebMCPDraft · Chrome 149 origin trial only, in no browser’s stable channeldocument.modelContextIn-page declarations: the same tools declared to the browser from the page itself, alive only while the tab is open.
  3. ARDProposal/.well-known/ard.jsonA discovery manifest at a known address, so an agent can find that the other two exist without reading the site.
  • The graph: the one list, and what is read from it
  • The compile: the step that is Frontlatch’s
  • A target format: the standard’s shape, not ours
The designed mechanism, not a recording. Of the three targets, MCP is live: frontlatch.com/mcp serves the business index and an ARD catalogue names it. WebMCP is not emitted for any site. Each status is the standard’s own, as read on 27 August 2026, and a draft is drawn as a draft.

Paying for it

When an agent has to pay for what it books, there is no single standard to pay through. Two are in the field: ACP, from Stripe and OpenAI, and UCP, from Shopify and Google. As of August 2026 the split is unresolved and merchants are being told to support both.

Frontlatch publishes to all three from one Action Graph, and follows the payment standards as they settle rather than picking a winner for you.

What the scan found

15 of 15

sites in our scan published none of the three

Fifteen service businesses, scanned read-only. No catalogue, no declared tools, no endpoint, on any of them.

The scanner and the tracker are built, tested and running; the scanner produced the figure above. The gateway is running too: frontlatch.com/mcp answers MCP JSON-RPC (initialize, tools/list, tools/call) over every business in the business index, and /.well-known/ard.json is the ARD entry that names it. The earlier path, /.well-known/ai-catalog.json, still serves the same entry for registries built against it.

Its do tool refuses every call except two: a business that has claimed its listing and switched an action on for email-confirm routing gets a pending, logged attempt and a confirm email, and a business that switched on agent sign-ups lets do create an account for a user who confirmed it in their chat (name and email only, never a password or card).

Point an agent at the gateway.

Developer quickstartBrowse the business index