# How to make your tool agent-ready (slim)

> Agent-ready means an AI agent can find, understand, call, recover from and pay for a tool without a person in the loop. How we measure it, why only 166 of the 966 tools we list make it, and what gets a tool there.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/how-to-make-your-tool-agent-ready.md (~1,300 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/how-to-make-your-tool-agent-ready.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/how-to-make-your-tool-agent-ready
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-15

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.

### How do you decide?

With the Anchor benchmark, which scores nine categories against a published checklist [[1]](#ref-1).

| 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]](#ref-1).

### How many tools make it?

- 166: of 966 tools are agent-ready
- 1: graded AA
- 16: graded A
- 149: graded BB

Grades on 10 October 2026

That's 17% of what we list [[2]](#ref-2).

### What gets a tool from B to BB?

Mostly cheap things, and the earlier posts in this series cover them.

### Is Anchor Terminal agent-ready?

We built it to be.

### Can a vendor pay for a better grade?

No.

## 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.

[2] Anchor Terminal, the top list, 10 October 2026. Source for the count of agent-ready tools and the grade counts.

[3] Anchor Terminal, For agents.

[4] Anchor Terminal, For builders.

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- Older: [How to let agents pay you, with x402](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/how-to-let-agents-pay-you.md)
- All posts: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/index.md