Let Agents In

Agent readiness · algolia.com

2026-08-12 10:09 UTC · formula v9.2 · 7.1s

Your signup page answers 403 to anything that is not a browser.

https://dashboard.algolia.com/users/sign_up returned 403 across three tries. An agent that got this far still cannot open an account.

10/ 14

A dashed column is a stage we could not measure, not a stage you failed.

A · Discovery
4/5
B · Agent entry
2/4
C · Registration
n/m
D · Provisioning
2/3
E · Integration
2/2

of the 14 points that apply to you and we could measure · 3 of 17 were not scored

You 10 · category median 9 · best algolia.com 10 · 15 deterministic HTTP checks, published formula

Pass it onEmail itLinkedIn

Fix this first

+4points, taking 10/14 to 14/14

This is the whole list: everything we could measure and you do not pass. Another 3 points sit behind checks we could not evaluate on your domain, and each of those lines below says what would make it measurable.

  1. 1
    On-demand agents not blockedminutes · +1

    Your robots.txt already permits them, so this is not a robots.txt fix. Your edge answered ChatGPT-User 403 at a page it serves to a browser. Find the rule doing that, in the WAF or the bot manager, and exempt on-demand agents.

  2. 2
    Agent entry pointan afternoon · +2

    Publish /agent-signup.md: the path from nothing to a working key, written as steps for a machine rather than a tour for a person. Ours is at /agent-signup.md if you want a worked example, and it says plainly that we have nothing to sign up for.

  3. 3
    Programmatic key provisioningan afternoon · +1

    Document how a key is created without opening a dashboard: management API, service account or CLI. If no such path exists, that gap is the finding, not the docs.

Take it with you

4 of the checks an agent depends on, algolia.com does not pass.

Send yourself the list above with the checks that cost the most, and a permanent link. Whoever owns the fix is usually not the person who ran the scan.

One email with the report, and one follow-up asking what you did with it. No newsletter, no sequence. Delete on request at hello@letagentsin.com.

None of this tells you whether an agent picked you

Everything above is a file an agent could read. Whether one actually chose you is a different measurement, and we have not run it on algolia.com. What we have run it on is a rich text editor vendor: six agents, one brief, six isolated copies of a real codebase. All six picked the same competitor, and the vendor being studied was never named, not even on a rejection list, while the runs named and dismissed ten alternatives between them. In an earlier round, run before we isolated the copies, it was named twice and struck off both times in four words: Fully commercial, licence key required. That study is about them, not about you. It is here because it is the difference between a file and a decision.

Read the audits in fullWhat the same run on algolia.com costs

Against search as a service

You lead the 6 we have scanned in this category.

  1. 1
    algolia.comyou
    10/14
  2. 2
    elastic.co
    10/14
  3. 3
    meilisearch.com
    9/15
  4. 4
    typesense.org
    9/16
  5. 5
    oramasearch.com
    6/13
  6. 6
    searchkit.co
    5/13

Where competitors pass and algolia.com does not

  • On-demand agents not blockedmeilisearch.com · typesense.org · elastic.co · oramasearch.com · searchkit.co
  • Programmatic key provisioningtypesense.org · elastic.co

Only domains we have actually scanned appear here, so the ranking is a floor: a competitor missing from the list has not been measured, not beaten.

By stage

A
DiscoveryCan an agent find and read you?
4/5
B
Agent entryIs there a door built for a machine?
2/4
C
RegistrationCan an agent get an account?
not measured
D
ProvisioningCan it get credentials without a human?
2/3
E
IntegrationCan it ship working code?
2/2

Every check

Each line is one HTTP observation with a published rule, so you can rerun any of them yourself. Most are the same tomorrow if you are: the two that are not are the bot gate and the pricing page, which answer inconsistently on their own, which is why those run more than once and say so when the tries disagreed. PASS and PART are counted. UNMEASURED means we could not evaluate it, N/A means it does not apply to a product like yours, and neither is in the score or its denominator. See the formula

A · Discovery

  • PASS
    Answers an agent user-agentAnswered 200 to LetAgentsIn/1.0 (+https://letagentsin.com/methodology)
  • PASS
    llms.txt publishedllms.txt present at https://www.algolia.com/llms.txt and https://www.algolia.com/doc/llms.txt, and the 12 links we sampled across the file all answer
  • PASS
    Docs readable without JavaScript15,458 characters of text without JS, on https://www.algolia.com/doc/rest-api/search/add-api-key rather than on https://www.algolia.com/doc
  • FAIL
    On-demand agents not blockedrobots.txt permits them, but your edge answered ChatGPT-User 403 at https://www.algolia.com/doc, which a browser is servedChatGPT-User and Claude-User are not crawlers. They are your prospect, reading your docs mid-integration.
  • N/A
    Paths robots.txt points at answerrobots.txt names no concrete path, only patterns or nothing, so there is no claim to check
  • PASS
    No punishing crawl delayNo Crawl-delay applies to the agents we check

B · Agent entry

  • FAIL
    Agent entry pointNone of the 9 known agent entry paths returns a file rather than your page shellA markdown file written for a machine turns a guessing game into a procedure it can follow.
  • PASS
    OAuth dynamic client registrationregistration_endpoint published, but none of the 2 advertised grants (authorization_code, refresh_token) finishes without a person at a browser
  • PASS
    MCP surfaceLive MCP endpoint at https://mcp.algolia.com/mcp, answered 401 with an auth challenge

C · Registration

  • UNMEASURED
    No CAPTCHA in the signup HTMLUnmeasurable: the signup form at https://dashboard.algolia.com/users/sign_up is not in the server HTML, so its gates are not eitherServer-render the form, or tell us the endpoint it posts to, and the gates become visible to us and to an agent.
  • UNMEASURED
    Signup reachable without a browserUnmeasurable: https://dashboard.algolia.com/users/sign_up answers 403 to an agent and 403 to a Chrome user-agent, so nothing gets in from here and the difference we test for cannot be seenNothing for you to do here. It becomes measurable from a network your edge admits.

D · Provisioning

  • PART
    Programmatic key provisioning1 of 7 provisioning phrases across the 6 documents we read: "create an api key (or api token, access token, personal access token, service account, auth token, secret key), next to something programmatic"Documented key creation is the difference between a two-minute integration and a support ticket.
  • PASS
    Free tier or no-card trial stated in textFree tier or no-card signals at https://www.algolia.com/pricing: "try for free", "Free to start, then pay as you go", "Free to start"

E · Integration

  • PASS
    Typed SDK on the registryalgoliasearch@5.56.0 ships types, matched from the registry by who publishes it rather than by a link on your site
  • PASS
    Machine-readable API descriptionDocs serve markdown to machines, at https://www.algolia.com/doc

What we discovered on the way

Docs
https://www.algolia.com/doc · found on a subdomain
Pricing
https://www.algolia.com/pricing · linked from the site
Signup
https://dashboard.algolia.com/users/sign_up · linked from the site
npm package
algoliasearch (registry guess)
GitHub
not found
Package licence
MIT
Crawl-delay
none
Content-Signal
none
Blocked on-demand agents
none