---
title: "Financial Times agent readiness: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers"
description: "Financial Times on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 26 of 100, grade F. The door, what agents can read and do, the fixes worth most."
canonical: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/blog/ft-agent-readiness
site: "Agent Ready Crawlers"
last_updated: 2026-11-09
date: 2026-11-09
section: "360 checks"
---

# Financial Times agent readiness: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers

> Financial Times on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 26 of 100, grade F. The door, what agents can read and do, the fixes worth most.

Source: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/blog/ft-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

# Financial Times: the 360 agent-readiness check

In short

Financial Times scores 26 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, an F, read 9 November 2026. At the door, agents blocked: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended. 7 of 71 applicable checks pass; the gap worth most is OpenAPI spec published, about 4.7 points by Ora's estimate. A hard paywall with a developer portal that publishes no specification.

Financial Times is the Nikkei-owned business daily, one of the earliest hard paywalls in news. On 9 November 2026 its public site scored **26 of 100** on [Ora's](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) agent-readiness scan, an F, 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 125 of its checks for this one domain, grouped the way an agent meets them. Ora's one-line summary: Public API with reachable endpoints, but no OpenAPI specification published.

## The score

| Layer | Asks | Points | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Discovery | Can agents find and recommend it | 5 of 10 | 50% |
| Access | Can agents read it | 14 of 50 | 28% |
| Usability | Can agents use it | 7 of 58 | 12% |
| Payments | Can agents pay | 0 of 0 | none apply |
| Total | Grade F | 26 of 100 | 26% |

**

7 checks pass, 6 are partial, 58 fail and 54 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. 1 check in this group does not apply to this site and is 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/), [Claude-SearchBot](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/claude-searchbot/), [PerplexityBot](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/perplexitybot/), [Perplexity-User](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/perplexity-user/), [GPTBot](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/gptbot/), [ClaudeBot](https://agentreadycrawlers.com/crawlers/claudebot/).

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Not blocked by bot detection | Fail | 0 of 2 | Agents blocked: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended |
| Agent crawler reachability | Fail | 0 of 2 | No major AI crawler can reach the homepage - ChatGPT-User: challenged, ClaudeBot: blocked, Google-Extended: challenged, ora-agent: challenged, DeepSeekBot: challenged |
| robots.txt AI crawler policy | Partial | 1 of 2 | Training: 1/2. Search: 2/3 page/crawler pairs permitted. robots.txt restricts 2/5 evaluated page/crawler pairs. Checked 5 training and search crawlers (gptbot, claudebot, oai-searchbot, claude-searchbot, |
| robots.txt agent-user policy | Partial | 1 of 2 | robots.txt restricts 1/3 evaluated page/crawler pairs. Checked 3 user-triggered agents (chatgpt-user, claude-user, perplexity-user) on 1 public page. Restricted: perplexity-user at https://ft.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. 3 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 | Pass | 2 of 2 | Valid sitemap found at https://www.ft.com/sitemaps/index.xml with multiple sitemaps entries |
| Sitemap freshness (lastmod) | Partial | 0 of 1 | Sitemap lastmod dates are all stale - the newest is 11275 days old. Update lastmod when content changes or agents will deprioritize the whole site as unmaintained. |
| 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://ft.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 | Fail | 0 of 3 | No agent instruction file with when-to-use guidance found |

## 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.ft.com but no machine-verifiable API surface confirmed. GraphQL endpoint at https://ft.com/graphql is reachable; |
| Public API/docs linked from homepage | Pass | 3 of 3 | Documentation site found at https://developer.ft.com |
| Developer portal | Pass | 6 of 6 | Developer documentation portal found at https://developer.ft.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 tool-attribute forms and 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 | Fail | 0 of 3 | No CLI tool found |
| Multi-language SDK packages | Fail | 0 of 3 | No SDK packages found across language ecosystems |
| 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 | Fail | 0 of 4 | API does not return JSON error responses (or no API detected) |

## 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 | Pass | 3 of 3 | ft.com appears at position #1 in a clean brand-name search for "ft news intelligence" (4 total matches) |
| Wikipedia / Wikidata entity presence | Fail | 0 of 4 | No Wikipedia article or Wikidata entity found for "ft" - creating a Wikipedia page and a Wikidata item with P856 = ft.com is the highest-impact step for AI search citation coverage |
| Developer resource discoverability | Partial | 1 of 3 | Name search surfaced no pages on ft.com, although developer resources exist on the site (developer portal) - weak search indexing or transient search noise |
| NPM/PyPI SDK package | Fail | 0 of 1 | No NPM or PyPI SDK package found |
| ChatGPT app listed | Fail | 0 of 2 | Not found in ChatGPT app directory |
| Listed on skills.sh | Fail | 0 of 1 | No official skills self-published on skills.sh (100 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 (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 Financial Times, with what Ora observed. The wording of each fix is Ora's job; the links go to the check in its catalog.

OpenAPI spec published

Fail, 0 of 7, about 4.7 points to gain. Ora saw: No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found

MCP server / manifest

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

Developer resource discoverability

Partial, 1 of 3, about 4.4 points to gain. Ora saw: Name search surfaced no pages on ft.com, although developer resources exist on the site (developer portal) - weak search indexing or transient search noise

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

## Our read

The FT runs one of the oldest hard paywalls in news and its door reads that way: bot detection blocked or challenged every crawler Ora sent, the home page sits behind a security challenge, and robots.txt restricts two of five evaluated pairs. The score is nonetheless an F for reasons beyond the wall. Ora found no Wikipedia article or Wikidata item it could tie to the domain under the name it searched, which empties half the Discovery layer, and the developer portal at developer.ft.com describes an API without an OpenAPI specification, OAuth or any SDK. The sitemap index is sound and the brand ranks first for its own name. A paywalled publisher will not open its articles for a score, but the portal, the knowledge graph entry and a published specification are all outside the paywall, and they are where the 26 would move.

## 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 ft.com, GET /api/score (vendor)](https://ora.ai/api/score/ft.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
-   [Financial Times home page](https://www.ft.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