--- title: "South China Morning Post: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers" description: "South China Morning Post on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 53 of 100, grade C. The door, what agents can read and do, the fixes worth most." canonical: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/blog/scmp-agent-readiness site: "Agent Ready Crawlers" last_updated: 2026-11-09 date: 2026-11-09 section: "360 checks" --- # South China Morning Post: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers > South China Morning Post on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 53 of 100, grade C. The door, what agents can read and do, the fixes worth most. Source: https://agentreadycrawlers.com/blog/scmp-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 # South China Morning Post: the 360 agent-readiness check In short South China Morning Post scores 53 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, a C, read 9 November 2026. At the door, site accessible to 4 agent user-agents (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot). 23 of 76 applicable checks pass. The most agent-ready Asian title here, on the strength of its policy and an MCP server. South China Morning Post is Hong Kong's English-language daily, owned by Alibaba. On 9 November 2026 its public site scored **53 of 100** on [Ora's](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycrawlers.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) agent-readiness scan, a C. 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: SCMP publishes a sitemap and permits AI crawlers, but lacks any public API, OpenAPI spec, or developer documentation. ## The score | Layer | Asks | Points | Share | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Discovery | Can agents find and recommend it | 10 of 15 | 67% | | Access | Can agents read it | 25 of 52 | 48% | | Usability | Can agents use it | 28 of 56 | 50% | | Payments | Can agents pay | 0 of 0 | none apply | | Total | Grade C | 53 of 100 | 53% | ** 23 checks pass, 9 are partial, 44 fail and 56 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. 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 | Pass | 2 of 2 | Site accessible to 4 agent user-agents (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot). | | Agent crawler reachability | Pass | 2 of 2 | Reachable to every agent we tested - ChatGPT-User: reachable, OAI-SearchBot: reachable, Claude-User: reachable, PerplexityBot: reachable | | robots.txt AI crawler policy | Pass | 2 of 2 | AI search crawlers: allowed in 3 of 3 checks (3 crawlers on 1 page). AI training crawlers: allowed in 2 of 2 checks (2 crawlers on 1 page), not scored. | | 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://scmp.com/. Declared policy only; | | Content behind auth | Pass | 2 of 2 | All 5 sampled pages are publicly readable (0 with substantive content) | | Homepage not hidden from search | Pass | 1 of 1 | No noindex on the homepage: no robots, googlebot or bingbot meta tag and no X-Robots-Tag header hides it from search. | | 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. 1 check in this group does not apply to this site and is left out. | Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Content without JavaScript | Partial | 1 of 3 | Homepage: 5940 chars of readable text, but no H1 tag. No inner pages checked: the 5 sampled pages were skipped (forms, login pages, bot challenges, error pages, non-HTML pages and pages over 1 MB are skipped). | | Page token budget | Pass | 1 of 1 | All 1 measured page fit an agent context budget (largest ~1K tokens) | | Sitemap exists | Pass | 2 of 2 | Valid sitemap found at https://www.scmp.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://scmp.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 (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User) receives markdown when requesting HTML. Optional: detect AI-bot UAs server-side and serve them a markdown representation directly. | | Agent mode view | Fail | 0 of 2 | ?mode=agent returns same content as homepage (no dedicated agent view) | | JSON-LD structured data | Partial | 2 of 4 | JSON-LD Organization found - missing description on this entity | | Organization schema completeness | Partial | 1 of 2 | Organization schema found but missing: address | | JSON-LD entity linking (sameAs) | Pass | 2 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 | Fail | 0 of 2 | No extended schema types found - AI can only answer basic questions about this entity | | Metadata completeness | Pass | 2 of 2 | All metadata signals present: canonical URL, lang="en", 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. 5 checks in this group do not apply to this site and are left out. | Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Public API with reachable endpoints | Fail | 0 of 7 | No publicly reachable API surface detected (REST and GraphQL both absent or auth-gated) | | Public API/docs linked from homepage | Fail | 0 of 3 | No public API or documentation page linked from homepage | | 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://help.scmp.com/mcp; 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://help.scmp.com/mcp - list its server card, hosted on your own domain, in /.well-known/ai-catalog.json so MCP clients can discover it | | 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.scmp.com/mcp/oauth | | OAuth Protected Resource metadata (RFC 9728) | Pass | 2 of 2 | Metadata at /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource (RFC 9728) that tells agents your auth requirements up front, instead of leaving them to trial and error. | | 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 | Fail | 0 of 1 | No NLWeb-conformant /ask endpoint found via GET or POST | | 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. 1 check in this group does not apply to this site and is left out. | Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Brand name discoverability | Pass | 3 of 3 | scmp.com ranks #2 for "South China Morning Post Opinion" and #3 for "South China Morning Post News" | | Wikipedia / Wikidata entity presence | Pass | 4 of 4 | Wikipedia "South China Morning Post" and Wikidata Q1198574 both verified - domain confirmed on both sources | | Developer resource discoverability | Fail | 0 of 3 | In a search for your API docs, none of the 10 results is your official docs. In a search for your MCP server, SDK or CLI, none of the 10 results is your own, although the scan found one on your site | | Listed in MCP registries | Fail | 0 of 1 | No verified entry in the official MCP Registry or on Smithery, and no npm or PyPI package of yours that runs as an MCP server. To pass, | | 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, 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 South China Morning Post, with what Ora observed. The wording of each fix is Ora's job; the links go to the check in its catalog. Public API with reachable endpoints Fail, 0 of 7, about 5.6 points to gain. Ora saw: No publicly reachable API surface detected (REST and GraphQL both absent or auth-gated) OpenAPI spec published Fail, 0 of 7, about 4.5 points to gain. Ora saw: No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found Developer resource discoverability Fail, 0 of 3, about 4.4 points to gain. Ora saw: In a search for your API docs, none of the 10 results is your official docs. In a search for your MCP server, SDK or CLI, none of the 10 results is your own, although the scan found one on your site Scoped permissions Fail, 0 of 5, about 4 points to gain. Ora saw: No declared OAuth scopes, security schemes, or scoped-permission documentation found WebMCP support Fail, 0 of 5, about 4 points to gain. Ora saw: No WebMCP support detected - no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found ## Our read The South China Morning Post is the most agent-ready of the Asian titles here, and it is almost entirely a policy decision: robots.txt allows the AI search crawlers on three of three checks and the training crawlers on both, places no restriction on the user-triggered agents, and all four test agents reached the home page. Ora also detected an MCP server behind authentication at help.scmp.com/mcp with OAuth metadata beside it, which lifts the Usability layer to 28 of 56. The weak points are on the page: 5,940 characters of text without an H1, five sampled pages that Ora skipped as forms rather than articles, and an Organization JSON-LD missing its description. No llms.txt, no API and no OpenAPI specification. A C at 53 for Alibaba's Hong Kong daily would move with an H1 and an llms.txt before anything on the developer list. ## 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 scmp.com, GET /api/score (vendor)](https://ora.ai/api/score/scmp.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 - [South China Morning Post home page](https://www.scmp.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