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The census of what AI agents can do

Method version 1, last changed 18 October 2026. JSON Schemas: an edition, the list of editions · an example: census-edition.json. The counts are open data under CC BY 4.0: credit “Surfing Dog census, surfingdog.ai, CC BY 4.0”.

Once a month we count how many of the websites we checked an AI agent can do each thing with: send a message, book, order, pay, and the rest of the capability vocabulary. The census counts. It never names a website.

Who is counted

Section titled “Who is counted”

Every website our crawler has read and scored, except:

  • a site whose owner hid its result,
  • a site that asked not to be read,
  • the kinds of business the directory leaves out: adult services, gambling, weapons, tobacco, cannabis and vaping, payday loans and bail bonds.

The sites come from:

  • public lists: places with a website in open place data from Overture Maps, and the most visited sites in the Chrome UX Report;
  • the MCP Registry, a list of servers made for agents;
  • links our crawler followed;
  • checks people asked for, and businesses in the directory.

Each edition counts the sites from each of these on its own (source). Most of the sites are businesses; some are not, like governments, universities and encyclopedias, which are among the most visited sites. A list chosen for its agent doors, like the MCP Registry, has a high share by how it was chosen. This is not a random sample of the world’s websites: say so wherever you use the numbers.

What is counted

Section titled “What is counted”
Metric Counts
checked websites read
agent_ready of those, the ones an agent can reach through a door: askable or above, or a business in the directory with its own inbox. A site that tells AI systems not to use its content is never counted as agent-ready, unless it runs its own inbox in the directory.
can:<capability> of the agent-ready, those where an agent can do it: its state is yes, through a door the site published, and not on experimental evidence alone
door:<type> of the agent-ready, those with a live door of that type: inbox, mcp, a2a, openapi, ucp, acp, webmcp
level:<name> how many reached each readiness level: none, listed and readable among those checked, askable and above among the agent-ready
no_ai of those checked, the sites whose doors reach askable or above and that ask AI systems to stay away
places for a city: how many places its list holds, read or not, so you can see how much of the city the counts cover

The levels and no_ai add up to checked. A capability’s state comes from the score rules in force when the edition is taken; the edition names their version, the day they were last revised (score_rules.revised: a version amended in place counts differently), their content’s hash and how many of the sites checked were scored under them. An edition is never taken while the scores are moving to new rules. A state is declared (the site’s own pages or door say so) or tested (our own read saw the door list it). Neither means an agent carried it out.

Breakdowns

Section titled “Breakdowns”
  • Country: the country the site’s address data names; else its country domain (.fr is France, .uk the United Kingdom; .io, .co, .ai and other domains sold as names are no country); else the region of its page’s language. A site with none is counted under none.
  • Kind of business: the directory’s category group. Software, API and AI companies are a kind of their own. A site whose kind we could not tell is counted under none. Online shops are partly recognised by their agent doors (a shopping protocol’s profile, a shop platform’s door), so their share is high by construction.
  • Platform: the website builder or shop system we read on the site’s own pages, none when we saw none.
  • Source: where the site came from, as above: seed (the public lists), registry, discovered, checked.
  • City: the ten cities we have sampled so far. Each city’s list is a random sample of up to 25,000 places with a website in seven kinds (restaurants, cafés and bars; hotels; hair and beauty; dentists; clinics; shops; gyms) from Overture Maps places data; the edition names the lists (method.places_sources). A city’s places is its list’s size, not how many businesses it has. A city is partial until we have read 80% of its list (method.city_read).
  • Minimum sample: a country, kind of business, platform, source or city is published only when we checked at least 100 of its sites. Each edition says how many were left out. Within a published key, small counts are published as they are: each counts public features of websites, and no row names one.

Editions

Section titled “Editions”
  • An edition records one month and is named for it: 2026-10.
  • It is taken as a draft once the month has ended, on the next month’s first day after 00:30 UTC. A person reads it, then publishes that draft, named by when it was taken (as_of). A draft taken before its month ended is published only with a note saying why (publish_note).
  • Once published, its counts never change. If a mistake is found, the edition is marked withdrawn, stays readable, and says why.
  • A change from the previous edition is a change in share, in percentage points of those checked (or of the agent-ready, for doors): the sites checked change from month to month, so a count can grow while its share does not.

The data

Section titled “The data”
  • GET https://surfingdog.ai/v1/census lists the editions.
  • GET https://surfingdog.ai/v1/census/{edition} is one edition as JSON; https://surfingdog.ai/census/{edition}.csv the same rows as CSV, with the header edition,scope,key,metric,value. The MCP tool get_census answers the same, cut to one scope or key.
  • Rows are long: one count per scope, key and metric. Every published key has a row for every metric, zero included. A reader skips a scope or a metric it does not know: both are added to, never renamed.
  • The counts are open data under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0): use them for anything, crediting “Surfing Dog census, surfingdog.ai, CC BY 4.0”. City counts rest on Overture Maps places data: credit “© Overture Maps Foundation” with them (licence.credits). The directory’s own data stays under the Open Database License 1.0.

Changelog

Section titled “Changelog”
  • 18 October 2026: websites, not businesses; where the sites came from (source); the levels from askable up among the agent-ready, and no_ai; the score rules by revision, hash and share; changes in percentage points; cities partial below 80% of their list; a draft published by when it was taken; the counts under CC BY 4.0, credited “Surfing Dog census, surfingdog.ai, CC BY 4.0” (the founder’s decision of this day; the ODbL before). Nothing was published before.
  • 15 October 2026: method version 1.