---
title: "Medium agent readiness: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers"
description: "Medium on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 35 of 100, grade D. What agents meet at the door, what they can read and do, and the fixes worth most."
canonical: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/blog/medium-agent-readiness
site: "Agent Ready Crawlers"
last_updated: 2026-11-09
date: 2026-11-09
section: "360 checks"
---

# Medium agent readiness: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers

> Medium on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 35 of 100, grade D. What agents meet at the door, what they can read and do, and the fixes worth most.

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

# Medium: the 360 agent-readiness check

In short

Medium scores 35 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, a D, read 9 November 2026. At the door, agents blocked: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended. 11 of 72 applicable checks pass; the gap worth most is OpenAPI spec published, about 4.3 points by Ora's estimate. A bot wall overruling a permissive robots.txt, with an MCP server behind it.

Medium is a blogging platform that blocks AI training crawlers by default for its writers. On 9 November 2026 its public site scored **35 of 100** on [Ora's](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) agent-readiness scan, a D. 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: Medium offers developer resource discoverability, but lacks an OpenAPI specification.

## The score

| Layer | Asks | Points | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Discovery | Can agents find and recommend it | 9 of 15 | 60% |
| Access | Can agents read it | 6 of 54 | 11% |
| Usability | Can agents use it | 27 of 65 | 42% |
| Payments | Can agents pay | 0 of 0 | none apply |
| Total | Grade D | 35 of 100 | 35% |

**

11 checks pass, 7 are partial, 54 fail and 47 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/), [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: blocked, ClaudeBot: blocked, Google-Extended: blocked, ora-agent: blocked, DeepSeekBot: blocked |
| robots.txt AI crawler policy | Partial | 1 of 2 | Training: 0/2. Search: 3/3 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 | Pass | 2 of 2 | No applicable crawl or usage restriction found for 3 user-triggered agents (chatgpt-user, claude-user, perplexity-user) on 1 public page: https://medium.com/. Declared policy only; |
| 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. 2 checks in this group do not apply to this site and are left out.

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Content without JavaScript | Unverified | 0 of 3 | Could not fetch homepage |
| Sitemap exists | Pass | 2 of 2 | Valid sitemap found at https://medium.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml with multiple sitemaps entries |
| Sitemap freshness (lastmod) | Pass | 1 of 1 | Dates in your sitemap tell agents what changed and when, so they reread fresh pages instead of guessing. We check lastmod dates parse and the newest is recent. |
| 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://medium.com/index.md and it did not return markdown (expected text/markdown content-type or a heading-led non-HTML body). |
| Bot-UA markdown serving | Fail | 0 of 1 | No probed bot User-Agent (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, ora-agent, DeepSeekBot) receives markdown when requesting HTML. |
| Agent mode view | Fail | 0 of 2 | No agent mode view detected at ?mode=agent (optional) |
| JSON-LD structured data | Unverified | 0 of 4 | Could not fetch homepage |
| Organization schema completeness | Unverified | 0 of 2 | Company details (contact, address) in your structured data. AIs use them to verify you are a real business before recommending you. |
| JSON-LD entity linking (sameAs) | Unverified | 0 of 2 | sameAs links from your structured data to your official profiles (GitHub, LinkedIn, app stores). They let AIs confirm that every mention of you is actually you. |
| Schema type breadth | Unverified | 0 of 2 | The more kinds of content you mark up with schema.org (FAQs, reviews, services, events, videos), the more kinds of questions an AI can answer about you with confidence. |
| Metadata completeness | Unverified | 0 of 2 | Could not fetch homepage |
| 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 | GraphQL endpoint at https://graphql.medium.com/graphql is reachable; introspection requires authentication (API key / OAuth), which is expected for agent access. Best-of-protocols score: 7/7. |
| Public API/docs linked from homepage | Fail | 0 of 3 | No public API or documentation page linked from homepage |
| Developer portal | Fail | 0 of 6 | No developer portal found |
| 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 | Partial | 5 of 6 | MCP server detected at https://mcp.medium.com; it requires authentication. Presence is verified (5/6), but Ora could not inspect its tools or verify access scopes without credentials. |
| MCP well-known discovery | Partial | 1 of 2 | MCP server at https://mcp.medium.com - consider adding /.well-known/mcp for standard discovery |
| 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 | Pass | 5 of 5 | OAuth authorization server metadata at https://help.medium.com/mcp/oauth |
| 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 | Pass | 3 of 3 | CLI package found on npm: medium-cli |
| Multi-language SDK packages | Partial | 1 of 3 | SDK package found only in pypi |
| 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.

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Brand name discoverability | Partial | 1 of 3 | medium.com appears once in brand-name search results for "medium" (position #9 out of 9) |
| Wikipedia / Wikidata entity presence | Pass | 4 of 4 | Wikipedia "Medium (website)" and Wikidata Q16186120 both verified - domain confirmed on both sources |
| 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. |
| Listed in MCP registries | Fail | 0 of 1 | No bi-directionally verified MCP registry entry found. To pass, either publish the server under your own domain/npm scope, get a verified Smithery listing with non-zero usage, or link the registry entry from your homepage or docs. |
| 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 |
| Registry branding | Fail | 0 of 2 | No registry branding (name, icon, description) found |
| 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 Medium, 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 4.3 points to gain. Ora saw: No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found

Developer portal

Fail, 0 of 6, about 3.7 points to gain. Ora saw: No developer portal found

Scoped permissions

Fail, 0 of 5, about 3.4 points to gain. Ora saw: No declared OAuth scopes, security schemes, or scoped-permission documentation found

WebMCP support

Fail, 0 of 5, about 3.4 points to gain. Ora saw: No WebMCP support detected - no tool-attribute forms and no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found

Brand name discoverability

Partial, 1 of 3, about 3 points to gain. Ora saw: medium.com appears once in brand-name search results for "medium" (position #9 out of 9)

## Our read

Medium blocks the AI training crawlers by default for its writers, and on this read it blocked the readers' agents as well: bot detection turned away GPTBot, ClaudeBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended, and the home page could not be fetched. The robots.txt says something gentler, allowing the search crawlers on three of three checks and placing no restriction on the user-triggered agents, so the server is stricter than the policy. Behind the wall there is more agent infrastructure than on any newspaper here: an MCP server at mcp.medium.com with OAuth metadata, a reachable GraphQL endpoint, a PyPI package and a CLI, which is why the Usability layer reads 27 of 65. No llms.txt, no OpenAPI specification, no developer portal. A D at 35 for the platform is the bot wall overruling a permissive file.

## 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 medium.com, GET /api/score (vendor)](https://ora.ai/api/score/medium.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
-   [Medium home page](https://medium.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