---
title: "The Economist agent readiness: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers"
description: "The Economist on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 36 of 100, grade D. The door, what agents can read and do, the fixes worth most."
canonical: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/blog/economist-agent-readiness
site: "Agent Ready Crawlers"
last_updated: 2026-11-09
date: 2026-11-09
section: "360 checks"
---

# The Economist agent readiness: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers

> The Economist on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 36 of 100, grade D. The door, what agents can read and do, the fixes worth most.

Source: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/blog/economist-agent-readiness
Site: Agent Ready Crawlers
Last reviewed: 2026-11-09
Agent endpoints: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/llms.txt (index), https://agentreadycrawlers.com/openapi.json (API), https://agentreadycrawlers.com/mcp (MCP server), https://agentreadycrawlers.com/ask (search)
Access: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/auth.md (no key). Pricing: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/pricing.md (free).

360 check, 9 November 2026

# The Economist: the 360 agent-readiness check

In short

The Economist scores 36 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, a D, read 9 November 2026. At the door, bot management challenged ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot. 10 of 71 applicable checks pass; the gap worth most is MCP server / manifest, about 4.6 points by Ora's estimate. Every agent is challenged, yet a working developer portal survives behind the wall.

The Economist is a weekly with a hard paywall and a licensing deal culture of its own. On 9 November 2026 its public site scored **36 of 100** on [Ora's](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) agent-readiness scan, a D, in Ora's News & Intelligence category. Ora probes a site the way an agent would: it requests pages with the agents' own user agents, reads robots.txt, looks for the files agents read, and tries the API, MCP and payment surfaces. The check below walks through all 132 of its checks for this one domain, grouped the way an agent meets them. Ora's one-line summary: Economist blocks all agents via robots.txt and requires JavaScript before agents can see any homepage content.

## The score

| Layer | Asks | Points | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Discovery | Can agents find and recommend it | 9 of 14 | 64% |
| Access | Can agents read it | 13 of 53 | 25% |
| Usability | Can agents use it | 18 of 58 | 31% |
| Payments | Can agents pay | 0 of 0 | none apply |
| Total | Grade D | 36 of 100 | 36% |

**

10 checks pass, 11 are partial, 50 fail and 61 do not apply to this site. Every check is defined in [Ora's catalog](https://ora.ai/api/checks?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) (read 2026-11-05); the result for each one is in the groups below, with what Ora saw where it said.

## At the door

What the site answers when a request arrives with an agent’s user agent, and what robots.txt says to the crawlers in the Index. 2 checks in this group do not apply to this site and are left out.

Agents named in Ora's results, with their Index rows: [ChatGPT-User](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/chatgpt-user/), [OAI-SearchBot](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/oai-searchbot/), [Claude-User](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/claude-user/), [PerplexityBot](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/perplexitybot/), [Perplexity-User](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/perplexity-user/).

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Not blocked by bot detection | Partial | 0 of 2 | Bot management challenged ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot. A challenge is an identity check that verified crawlers pass, |
| Agent crawler reachability | Partial | 0 of 2 | Bot management challenged ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot - a challenge is an identity check verified crawlers pass, so reachability is undetermined rather than blocked (ChatGPT-User: challenged, |
| robots.txt AI crawler policy | Fail | 0 of 2 | AI search crawlers: allowed in 0 of 3 checks (3 crawlers on 1 page). AI training crawlers: allowed in 0 of 2 checks (2 crawlers on 1 page), not scored. robots.txt restricts 3/3 evaluated search page/crawler pairs. |
| robots.txt agent-user policy | Fail | 0 of 2 | robots.txt restricts 3/3 evaluated page/crawler pairs. Checked 3 user-triggered agents (chatgpt-user, claude-user, perplexity-user) on 1 public page. Restricted: chatgpt-user at https://economist.com/ (Disallow: /, |
| Redirect hygiene | Pass | 1 of 1 | Pages agents land on serve real content, not meta-refresh or JavaScript-only redirect stubs that strand non-JS agents |
| Web Bot Auth directory | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory found |

## What an agent can read

Whether the text is in the first response, what the site publishes for agents, and how it describes itself to them. 4 checks in this group do not apply to this site and are left out.

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Content without JavaScript | Partial | 0 of 3 | Homepage blocked by WAF/security challenge - content not accessible to agents |
| Sitemap exists | Fail | 0 of 2 | No sitemap found |
| llms.txt exists | Fail | 0 of 1 | No llms.txt found at /llms.txt or /.well-known/llms.txt. |
| llms.txt formatting | Fail | 0 of 2 | No llms.txt found to evaluate quality |
| Markdown agent docs | Fail | 0 of 1 | Missing markdown content negotiation. Homepage returned text/html when probed with Accept: text/markdown (expected text/markdown), and none of the well-known root paths (/llms.md, /auth.md, /agents.md, /developers.md, |
| Markdown URL fallback | Fail | 0 of 2 | Homepage does not support the .md suffix. Probed https://economist.com/index.md and it did not return markdown (expected text/markdown content-type or a heading-led non-HTML body). |
| Agent mode view | Fail | 0 of 2 | No agent mode view detected at ?mode=agent (optional) |
| JSON-LD structured data | Fail | 0 of 4 | No JSON-LD structured data found on homepage |
| Organization schema completeness | Fail | 0 of 2 | No JSON-LD found - Organization schema missing |
| JSON-LD entity linking (sameAs) | Fail | 0 of 2 | No JSON-LD found - no entity linking possible |
| Schema type breadth | Fail | 0 of 2 | No extended schema types found - AI can only answer basic questions about this entity |
| Metadata completeness | Partial | 1 of 2 | Only 1/4 metadata signals present - missing: canonical URL, og:image, og:type |
| Agent instruction / when-to-use | Partial | 2 of 3 | When-to-use guidance found at https://developer.economist.com |

## What an agent can do

The surfaces an agent acts on: an API it can find and call, an MCP server, an agent card, a command line.

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Public API with reachable endpoints | Pass | 7 of 7 | API described in documentation at https://developer.economist.com but no machine-verifiable API surface confirmed. GraphQL endpoint at https://economist.com/v1/graphql is reachable; |
| Public API/docs linked from homepage | Pass | 3 of 3 | Documentation site found at https://developer.economist.com |
| Developer portal | Pass | 6 of 6 | Developer portal found at https://developer.economist.com |
| OpenAPI spec published | Fail | 0 of 7 | No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found |
| API catalog (RFC 9727) | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /.well-known/api-catalog found (RFC 9727) |
| MCP server / manifest | Fail | 0 of 6 | No MCP server or manifest found |
| MCP well-known discovery | Fail | 0 of 2 | No MCP server URL discovered |
| A2A / agent-card | Fail | 0 of 2 | No A2A agent card found at /.well-known/agent-card.json |
| Agent discovery file | Fail | 0 of 2 | No agent discovery file found |
| OAuth 2.0 support | Fail | 0 of 5 | No OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect support detected |
| OAuth Protected Resource metadata (RFC 9728) | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource found (RFC 9728) |
| auth.md exists | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /auth.md found at site root |
| WebMCP support | Fail | 0 of 5 | No WebMCP support detected - no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found |
| NLWeb /ask endpoint | Pass | 1 of 1 | NLWeb /ask endpoint exists but requires authentication (HTTP 403, via GET) |
| CLI tool available | Pass | 3 of 3 | CLI package found on npm: @economist/provision-npm-utility |
| Multi-language SDK packages | Partial | 1 of 3 | SDK package found only in npm |
| Rate limit response headers | Fail | 0 of 2 | GraphQL introspection auth-gated and no header convention documented on GraphQL-tagged pages |
| Idempotency-Key support | Fail | 0 of 3 | GraphQL introspection auth-gated and no idempotency documentation found on GraphQL-tagged pages |
| JSON error responses | Pass | 4 of 4 | When something breaks, agents need a structured JSON error, not an HTML error page. One is recoverable, the other is a dead end. |

## Found and recommended

Whether an assistant can find the company by name, confirm what it is, and see it in the registries agents read. 2 checks in this group do not apply to this site and are left out.

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Brand name discoverability | Partial | 1 of 3 | economist.com ranks #8 for "economist" (searched your brand name alone: we could not read a product term from your site) |
| Wikipedia / Wikidata entity presence | Partial | 2 of 4 | Wikidata Q180089 (The Economist) verified - draft a Wikipedia page with cited references to complete knowledge graph coverage |
| Developer resource discoverability | Pass | 3 of 3 | Can an agent find your developer resources with the searches it would really run? We search for your API docs and expect your own docs page among the results, then for your MCP server, SDK or CLI and, when you have one, expect your own page for it. Pages on other sites, including other companies with a similar name, don't count, unless your homepage or llms.txt links that site's docs, or your homepage redirects to a parent company's site and the page's address names your product. GitHub repos count only in an org your site links to. |
| NPM/PyPI SDK package | Pass | 1 of 1 | An official SDK or CLI on NPM or PyPI gives agents and the developers steering them a ready-made way in, instead of hand-rolling every API call. |
| ChatGPT app listed | Pass | 2 of 2 | Listed in the ChatGPT app directory, where hundreds of millions of users can pull your product into a conversation by name. Upside-only: the directory is curated and gated, so absence never costs points. |
| Listed on skills.sh | Fail | 0 of 1 | No official skills self-published on skills.sh (84 community skills with potential relation to this domain found, but only self-published official skills count) |
| ARD discovery | Fail | 0 of 1 | No /.well-known/ard.json, no same-site rel="ard" link, and no legacy /.well-known/ai-catalog.json |

## The fixes worth most points

Ora attaches an estimate to each failing or partial check: how many points the site would gain by passing it. These are the 5 with the largest estimates for The Economist, with what Ora observed. The wording of each fix is Ora's job; the links go to the check in its catalog.

MCP server / manifest

Fail, 0 of 6, about 4.6 points to gain. Ora saw: No MCP server or manifest found

OpenAPI spec published

Fail, 0 of 7, about 4.4 points to gain. Ora saw: No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found

OAuth 2.0 support

Fail, 0 of 5, about 3.8 points to gain. Ora saw: No OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect support detected

Scoped permissions

Fail, 0 of 5, about 3.8 points to gain. Ora saw: No declared OAuth scopes, security schemes, or scoped-permission documentation found

WebMCP support

Fail, 0 of 5, about 3.8 points to gain. Ora saw: No WebMCP support detected - no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found

## Our read

The Economist sends every one of Ora's test agents through a bot-management challenge and writes the same refusal into robots.txt, which restricts all three user-triggered agents and lets no search crawler through on the three checks Ora ran. There is no sitemap for the agent to fall back on and no JSON-LD on the home page. The developer portal at developer.economist.com is the surprise: it documents an API, an npm package and a CLI, so the Usability layer earns 18 of 58 for a site whose front door is closed. The Wikidata item is verified while no Wikipedia page is tied to the domain. A D at 36 is roughly what a weekly with a hard paywall and a working developer site should expect; the question for its editors is whether the search crawlers belong on the same blocklist as the training ones.

## Check your own door

The scan above is free and needs no account: enter a domain at [ora.ai](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) and read the same four layers for your own site, then compare the door with the [Block Rate Report](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/block-rates/) for sites of your rank and kind. Our [guide to testing whether agents can reach your site](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/guides/test-whether-ai-agents-can-reach-your-site/) has the curl commands for a manual check, and the [robots.txt builder](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/robots-builder/) writes a policy file from the Index. Payments did not apply to this site; a site that sells would read that layer against the [vendors at the door](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/vendors/ranking/).

[Scan your own domain on Ora](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check)

[All 360 checks](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/blog/). One company a day; corrections to [the corrections page](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/corrections/).

**

The check we recommend

[Ora](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) scans a public URL: 16 Discovery checks and 42 Access checks, read from its catalog on 2026-11-05. Its Journey sends a real agent to the site. [How to run it](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/guides/test-whether-ai-agents-can-reach-your-site/).

**Limits.** Ora reads public URLs only, and what it records as blocked comes from its own network. It says the same scan run twice converges within a couple of points ([Ora's Deep Scan post](https://ora.ai/blog/introducing-deep-scan?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check)), and the pages we read give no repeat-scan figures. Its fixing product is behind a waitlist ([Ora's home page](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check)).

## Sources

-   [Ora's scan of economist.com, GET /api/score (vendor)](https://ora.ai/api/score/economist.com?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) read 2026-11-09
-   [Ora's check catalog, GET /api/checks (vendor)](https://ora.ai/api/checks?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) read 2026-11-05
-   [The Economist home page](https://www.economist.com/) read 2026-11-09
-   [How to test whether AI agents can reach your site (this site)](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/guides/test-whether-ai-agents-can-reach-your-site/) read 2026-11-04
-   [Ora: Deep Scan v2 (vendor)](https://ora.ai/blog/introducing-deep-scan?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) read 2026-11-05
-   [Ora home page, waitlist (vendor)](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) read 2026-11-05

Last reviewed 2026-11-09