What makes a business ready for AI agents

Five steps

We place each business on five steps, by the best door we find on its own site:

1. Listed. We found its name, or a page on a booking platform. A person can book there; an assistant can't yet.
2. Readable. Its own site says who and where it is, as data (name, address, opening hours), or it publishes llms.txt.
3. Askable. A door takes a message or a quote request.
4. Bookable. A door takes a booking or an order.
5. Payable. That door takes payment as well.

From askable up, a business is named on the leaderboards, and its result page may appear in search, unless its site tells AI systems not to use or train on its content.

Doors

A door is a machine address on the business's own domain, or one it declares when it claims its listing, that an assistant can use without a person in between. These count:

• An MCP server: tools an assistant can call, such as checking free times or making a booking.
• An A2A agent card, for a business with an AI agent of its own.
• A UCP or ACP checkout profile, for a shop.
• An OpenAPI document that describes an API.
• An agent inbox, with a manifest at /.well-known/agent-inbox.json.

Pages, forms, email, phone and chat widgets are made for people, so they don't count as doors. They still matter: an assistant reads them to learn about you. WebMCP tools in a page are read as experimental, and tools a page adds with a script aren't seen, since our check never runs JavaScript.

The guides

Each one says what an assistant needs, what the check counts, the ways to do it, and how to check it worked.

How the score works

Each check ends in an agentic score from 0 to 100, with a grade. It's worked out from what we read on the business's own site and doors, by rules that are published and versioned (rules as data).

What counts depends on the kind of business: a salon is scored on bookings, a shop on orders, a trade on quotes. A capability that doesn't apply is left out, so it never counts against anyone (how we tell your kind). What does apply sits in groups with fixed weights:

A yes earns a capability's full share, a partly half of it. Where an agent can book, order or sign up, changing and cancelling count too, and for an order, tracking and a receipt, so a full 100 needs the whole journey. Grades: A from 80, B from 60, C from 40, D from 20, E below 20.

Nobody can pay for a score, and it never changes a business's place in Surfing Dog Search (how that order works). It is not a certification: it is what the site and its doors said on the day we read them.