Research · Get found by agents · 15 October 2026
How to make your tool agent-ready
Agent-ready means an agent can find a tool, understand it, call it, recover when it fails and pay for it, without a person stepping in. On our benchmark that's a grade of BB or better, and 166 tools have one.
We use the phrase on every listing, so these are the questions vendors ask us about it.
Isn't a good tool agent-ready by definition?
No. A tool can be excellent for people and poor for agents. A dashboard, a sign-up with a captcha, an error that says "something went wrong" and pricing behind "contact sales" don't bother a person much, and every one of them stops an agent. Agent-ready means an agent can use the tool on its own, from finding out what it does to paying for it, without a person filling in a form or reading an error for it.
How do you decide?
With the Anchor benchmark, which scores nine categories against a published checklist [1]. Agent-ready is a grade of BB or better, a score of 70 or more out of 100.
| Category | Weight | What it asks |
|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16 | Does it stay up, and are failures reported? |
| Security & auth | 14 | Scoped keys or OAuth, least privilege, a security programme |
| Schema & documentation | 13 | A machine-readable description and docs an agent can read |
| Agent ergonomics | 13 | Clear errors, sensible limits, results sized for a context window |
| Performance | 10 | Latency per call, from our probes |
| Payments & pricing | 10 | Published prices, a free start, payment without a person |
| Task success | 10 | Whether an agent gets the job done, from our task suites |
| Maintenance & community | 7 | Recent releases and a vendor that answers |
| Transparency & trust | 7 | Clear terms, data handling, deprecation notices |
Performance and Task success need our own probes and task suites, which haven't run yet, so for now those two are pending and the other seven share their weight [1]. Every score on a listing comes with the reason and the sources.
How many tools make it?
That's 17% of what we list [2]. Most tools sit at B and C, usable by an agent with some help from a person or a framework. The top list has them in order and the best-of pages pick the agent-ready ones by category.
What gets a tool from B to BB?
Mostly cheap things, and the earlier posts in this series cover them. An OpenAPI description, and an MCP server people can find. A site an agent can read, with an llms.txt, a status page and a changelog. A way to pay without an account. Beyond those, errors with a code, a reason and when to retry, and keys that can be limited to reading or to one resource, and revoked. Every listing shows its score in each category and why, and the audit goes through it with a vendor who wants to know what's missing.
Is Anchor Terminal agent-ready?
We built it to be. Agents can use the whole site without a key, through an MCP server, an API, an llms.txt and a Markdown copy of every page [3]. Anchor Terminal itself isn't on the benchmark, since it's the thing doing the grading (marking your own homework never ends well). Our own products, letme and LocalGhost, are graded by the same checklist under a conflict rule, with a disclosure on each, and the benchmark page sets out how [1].
Can a vendor pay for a better grade?
No. Paid audits and help with a listing never change a score, and neither does claiming it. What a vendor can do is claim the listing, correct its facts and dispute any checklist item with evidence, and the builders page has how [4].
References
Read on 10 October 2026.
- [1]Anchor Terminal, the benchmark, methodology v0.4. Source for the categories, weights, pending categories, grade bands, the agent-ready threshold and how our own products are graded. anchorterminal.com
- [2]Anchor Terminal, the top list, 10 October 2026. Source for the count of agent-ready tools and the grade counts. anchorterminal.com
- [3]Anchor Terminal, For agents. Source for the MCP server, the API, llms.txt and the Markdown copies. anchorterminal.com
- [4]Anchor Terminal, For builders. Source for claiming, correcting facts and disputing a checklist item, and for claims never changing a score. anchorterminal.com