Serve at least 500 characters of meaningful homepage content in raw HTML. Add a clear H1, keep deeper heading levels sequential, and remove excessive non-content markup.

Publish an OpenAPI (Swagger) specification at /openapi.json or /api/openapi.yaml. This is how agents understand your API surface automatically.

Enable Markdown negotiation on the scanned homepage. Supporting it only on /docs or a separate .md URL does not satisfy this check. Requests with Accept: text/markdown must receive a nonempty Markdown body with Content-Type: text/markdown and Vary: Accept. Keep serving HTML for Accept: text/html. Adding Vary alone does not create a Markdown response. Verify both with curl -sS -L -i -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://yourdomain.com/ and curl -sS -L -i -H 'Accept: text/html' https://yourdomain.com/. Check the final response headers and body: Markdown with Vary: Accept for the first request, HTML for the second.

Declare scoped API permissions where machines can read them: named OAuth scopes in your OpenAPI security schemes, or scopes_supported in RFC 9728 protected-resource metadata. Prose descriptions of roles help humans, but agents need the machine-readable declaration to request least-privilege access.

Return structured JSON error responses with error codes, messages, and resolution hints. Agents can't parse HTML error pages.

Keep the correct HTTP 404 status. The remaining requirement is a Markdown error body when agents request Accept: text/markdown. Include at least 20 characters explaining the error and a link to your docs, sitemap, or llms.txt. Verify with curl -sS -L -i -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://yourdomain.com/some-path-that-does-not-exist. Check both the final 404 status and the Markdown body with Content-Type: text/markdown. Checking the status alone does not verify the missing requirement.

Add JSON-LD structured data to your homepage using the identity type that matches your site - SoftwareApplication for products, Organization or LocalBusiness for companies, Person for personal sites, Article for blogs - with name, description, url, and type-appropriate fields (offers, sameAs, author) so AI can parse your identity programmatically.

Add all four signals to your homepage: <link rel="canonical">, <html lang="...">, <meta property="og:image">, and <meta property="og:type">. Agents use these for entity resolution and attribution.

Add Organization JSON-LD that includes both contactPoint (with email/phone and contactType) and address (PostalAddress). This lets AI verify your business legitimacy and answer contact queries.

Offer a free tier or trial, self-serve API key generation, and a sandbox environment. Agents can't fill out 'contact sales' forms.

Build an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server exposing your API as tools. Use Streamable HTTP transport for full score. This lets Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI agents call your product natively.

Make your API spec self-describing: a unique operationId and a description on every operation, typed parameters, and response schemas. For GraphQL, a fully typed schema with a documented cost or rate limit reads best.

Ensure API endpoints have unique operation IDs, typed schemas, and descriptions compatible with LLM function-calling formats.

Make sure your own domain ranks in the top results when people search your brand together with your main product (for example "Acme payments API"). If it does not, your brand may be too generic, conflict with a more established term, or not yet indexed. Strengthen it by describing your main product clearly in your homepage title and headings, earning press mentions that link to your domain, and avoiding redirect chains that mask your main domain in search results.

Establish a Wikipedia article and a Wikidata entity for your brand, with the domain set as the official website (Wikidata property P856) and a corresponding external link on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the largest single source of citations in ChatGPT and a primary input to Knowledge Graphs across Google, Bing, and LLM training data. Earn third-party press coverage first to satisfy notability, then draft the article with cited references rather than self-promotion.

Tell agents when to reach for you: add a 'when to use this' section to your llms.txt (or a dedicated agent-instructions file) that names your best-fit use cases and how an agent should call you. Be specific about the jobs you are right for - generic marketing copy does not read as guidance.

Publish official SDK packages across multiple language ecosystems (npm, PyPI, Go modules, RubyGems). Auto-generate them from your OpenAPI spec using tools like openapi-generator. For each package set the project URL or homepage to your product domain (package.json repository/homepage, PyPI Home-Page or project_urls, RubyGems homepage_uri) - this is how agents verify the package is your official SDK.