---
title: "The Sun agent readiness: the 360 check | Agent Ready Crawlers"
description: "The Sun on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 32 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/thesun-agent-readiness
site: "Agent Ready Crawlers"
last_updated: 2026-11-09
date: 2026-11-09
section: "360 checks"
---

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

> The Sun on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-09: 32 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/thesun-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 Sun: the 360 agent-readiness check

In short

The Sun scores 32 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, a D, read 9 November 2026. At the door, site accessible to 6 AI agent user-agents. 13 of 74 applicable checks pass; the gap worth most is Developer resource discoverability, about 6.1 points by Ora's estimate. Open at the server and lost in search under a generic name.

The Sun is News UK's tabloid and one of Britain's largest news sites. On 9 November 2026 its public site scored **32 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: The Sun has a sitemap, but lacks a published OpenAPI specification.

## The score

| Layer | Asks | Points | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Discovery | Can agents find and recommend it | 3 of 11 | 27% |
| Access | Can agents read it | 20 of 55 | 36% |
| Usability | Can agents use it | 18 of 56 | 32% |
| Payments | Can agents pay | 0 of 0 | none apply |
| Total | Grade D | 32 of 100 | 32% |

**

13 checks pass, 7 are partial, 54 fail and 51 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/), [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 | Pass | 2 of 2 | Site accessible to 6 AI agent user-agents |
| Agent crawler reachability | Pass | 2 of 2 | Reachable to all major AI crawlers - ChatGPT-User: reachable, ClaudeBot: reachable, Google-Extended: reachable, ora-agent: reachable, DeepSeekBot: reachable |
| robots.txt AI crawler policy | Partial | 1 of 2 | Training: 1/2. Search: 1/3 page/crawler pairs permitted. robots.txt restricts 3/5 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 2/3 evaluated page/crawler pairs. Checked 3 user-triggered agents (chatgpt-user, claude-user, perplexity-user) on 1 public page. Restricted: claude-user at https://thesun.co.uk/ (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. 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 | 9719 chars of readable text, but no H1 tag |
| Page token budget | Pass | 1 of 1 | All 1 measured page fit an agent context budget (largest ~2K tokens) |
| Sitemap exists | Pass | 2 of 2 | Valid sitemap found at https://www.thesun.co.uk/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://thesun.co.uk/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 | ?mode=agent returns same content as homepage (no dedicated agent view) |
| 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 | Pass | 2 of 2 | All metadata signals present: canonical URL, lang="en-US", 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. 3 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 |
| Developer portal | Pass | 6 of 6 | Developer portal found at /dashboard |
| 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 | First-party MCP server published by product org (npm, @sun-protocol/sun-mcp-server, 6974 score). Add live handshake at /.well-known/mcp for full credit. |
| 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 (scanned 1 of 1 same-origin script bundle(s) for modelContext registrations) |
| NLWeb /ask endpoint | Fail | 0 of 1 | No NLWeb-conformant /ask endpoint found via GET or POST |
| CLI tool available | Pass | 3 of 3 | CLI package found on npm: sun-cli |
| 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. 3 checks in this group do not apply to this site and are left out.

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Brand name discoverability | Fail | 0 of 3 | "The Sun" search returned 9 results but domain did not appear - brand may be too generic or not indexed |
| Wikipedia / Wikidata entity presence | Partial | 2 of 4 | Wikipedia "The Sun (United Kingdom)" verified - create a Wikidata item with P856 (official website) = thesun.co.uk to complete knowledge graph coverage |
| Developer resource discoverability | Fail | 0 of 3 | Agent searched for "sun" developer resources but found nothing relevant |
| 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 |
| 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 The Sun, with what Ora observed. The wording of each fix is Ora's job; the links go to the check in its catalog.

Developer resource discoverability

Fail, 0 of 3, about 6.1 points to gain. Ora saw: Agent searched for "sun" developer resources but found nothing relevant

Brand name discoverability

Fail, 0 of 3, about 6.1 points to gain. Ora saw: "The Sun" search returned 9 results but domain did not appear - brand may be too generic or not indexed

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 4.2 points to gain. Ora saw: No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found

OAuth 2.0 support

Fail, 0 of 5, about 4 points to gain. Ora saw: No OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect support detected

## Our read

The Sun is open at the server and buried in search. Ora's home page request was accepted for six agent user agents and the page gave 9,719 characters of text without JavaScript, though no H1 and no JSON-LD, while robots.txt restricts two of three user-triggered agents and three of five evaluated pairs overall. The Discovery layer at 3 of 11 is the story: a search for "The Sun" returned nine results and none was the newspaper, a Wikipedia page exists but no Wikidata item names the domain, and a search for developer resources found nothing. Ora also matched an npm package called sun-cli and an MCP server from an unrelated Sun project to the brand, which is what a generic name costs. No API and no OpenAPI specification. A D at 32 for News UK's tabloid is a naming problem before it is a technical one.

## 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 thesun.co.uk, GET /api/score (vendor)](https://ora.ai/api/score/thesun.co.uk?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 Sun home page](https://www.thesun.co.uk/) 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