Checkoutcheckout.com
com's API program shows strong API design fundamentals, but two areas create meaningful friction for partners and their AI agents: agent understanding and developer onboarding. Partners and coding agents currently lack the structured context files, runnable examples, and self-service portal they need to integrate confidently and quickly.
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about4 pass0 warn1 fail87A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable, versioned contractvia spec | 25/25 | Versioning declared (info.version="v1.0.0") and header-versioning detected. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | A current OpenAPI version with a declared versioning scheme lets agents reason about the contract. |
| pass | Schema coverage & depthvia sdk | 25/25 | 5/5 (100%) public params are fully typed (no any/**kwargs). Analyzer confirms all methods have a derivable input schema. Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 67%. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| pass | Auth declared & discoverablevia spec | 25/25 | authentication documented in the docs site at https://www.checkout.com/products/authentication-3ds. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%, wellknown 0%. | Agents can only authenticate when auth is declared, scoped, and discoverable. |
| pass | Example coveragevia sdk | 10/10 | README is present and includes a runnable quickstart. Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%. | Examples carry shape semantics schemas under-specify — for humans and agents alike. |
| fail | Security & governance hygienevia spec | 0/15 | 2 credential-shaped strings detected in spec: bearer-jwt (×2). Investigated: spec 0%, wellknown 0%. | No leaked secrets, no critical lint violations, no OWASP API Top-10 spec smells, and a published vulnerability-disclosure channel. |
Developer ExperienceThe context both developers and agents need to integrate fast — onboarding, code samples, complete descriptions and worked examples3 pass0 warn2 fail63C
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Quickstart presentvia docs | 25/25 | Quickstart at https://www.checkout.com/docs/get-started with a runnable first-call sample. Investigated: docs 100%. | A quickstart is the fastest path from landing page to first successful call. |
| pass | Description completenessvia spec | 15/15 | 78% description completeness (target 90%+). Investigated: spec 100%, sdk 100%. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| pass | Changelog publishedvia sdk | 13/13 | Newest official SDK activity 0 day(s) ago. Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%. | A published changelog lets partners track changes without surprise. |
| fail | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 0/29 | No signup page detected across conventional paths (/signup, /sign-up, /register, /get-started, /console/signup, /dashboard/signup, /try, /try-free, /free, /free-trial, /start, /start-free). Investigated: docs 0%. | Self-serve key/account creation is the fast first call for partners, with no sales gate. |
| fail | Code samples in docsvia docs | 0/18 | No detectable code samples across 20 sampled docs pages. Investigated: docs 0%. | Multi-language samples shorten time-to-first-call. |
Agent DiscoveryPartners and their agents can find your APIs — llms.txt, registries, crawlable and reachable docs1 pass3 warn0 fail77B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Registry & SDK presencevia docs | 28/28 | Indexed on Context7 (git_code_forgejo_org/actions_checkout, 634 snippets). Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 92%, cli 0%, mcp 0%, wellknown 0%. | Listing in MCP registries and publishing SDKs puts the API where agents and their tooling look. |
| warn | Docs reachable, not hard auth-gatedvia docs | 22.5/30 | Server ignores Accept: text/markdown header (0/1 pages return markdown). Investigated: docs 75%. | Agents can only index and fetch docs they can reach — past auth gates and over correct HTTP semantics. |
| warn | llms.txt present, valid & comprehensivevia docs | 13.1/30 | No llms.txt directive found in HTML of any of 1 pages. Investigated: docs 44%, sdk 0%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
| warn | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 9/12 | Sitemap present (1548 entries) but carries no lastmod values. Investigated: wellknown 75%. | Bots allowed plus a fresh sitemap make docs findable by agent crawlers. |
Agent UnderstandingAgents can correctly interpret your APIs — machine-readable errors, consistent descriptions, structured data, parseable docs2 pass3 warn1 fail78B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via docs | 28/28 | 16 distinct 4xx/5xx response codes documented. Investigated: docs 100%, spec 50%, sdk 0%. | RFC 9457 problem details and a documented error-code inventory let agents parse failures without burning tokens. |
| pass | Operation purpose clarityvia spec | 25/25 | 97% of operations have a clear summary + operationId an agent can select on. Investigated: spec 100%. | Agents select the right endpoint from its summary + operationId; clear, named operations make tool-selection reliable — the strongest driver of correct tool choice. |
| warn | Agent-navigable, token-efficient docsvia docs | 16.5/22 | No pages support .md URLs (0/1 tested). Investigated: docs 75%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| warn | Docs structured datavia docs | 4/8 | JSON-LD on 2/20 assessed pages, but coverage is sparse or dateModified is missing. Investigated: docs 50%. | Structured data (JSON-LD/schema.org) on docs pages gives agents an unambiguous parse target and is what answer engines cite. Detected on the JS-rendered head (Firecrawl) for a bounded page budget, so JS-injected JSON-LD is now caught; pages we can't render are excluded rather than failed. |
| warn | Description consistency across surfaces | 0.2/7 | Mean pairwise description similarity across 2 surfaces (spec, docs) is 1% (threshold 35% for full credit). | Every surface tells the same story about what the product is. |
| fail | Agent instructions file (AGENTS.md)via wellknown | 0/10 | No AGENTS.md at the site root or /.well-known/. Investigated: wellknown 0%. | An AGENTS.md gives coding agents explicit setup, auth, and usage instructions to interpret and operate the API — beyond llms.txt's link index. |
Agent UsabilityAgents have the context to use your APIs reliably, not just find them3 pass0 warn2 fail74B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Idempotency documentedvia sdk | 27/27 | Built-in retry machinery is present (grep-derived). Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%. | Documented idempotency lets agents retry safely. |
| pass | Pagination documented & consistentvia spec | 22/22 | Pagination params detected on 19 list endpoint(s). Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | Consistent, documented pagination lets agents traverse collections. |
| pass | Sandbox separationvia spec | 20/20 | sandbox documented in the docs site at https://www.checkout.com/get-test-account. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%, sdk 100%. | An isolated environment lets agents exercise destructive operations safely. |
| fail | Rate-limit signalingvia spec | 0/22 | No rate-limit response headers documented. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | Machine-readable rate-limit headers let agents throttle adaptively. |
| fail | Runnable collection with test scriptsvia platform | 0/9 | No public Postman workspace discovered for the org. Investigated: platform 0%. | A public, maintained collection with assertions is runnable truth agents validate against. |
Resources Discovered
The public resources we found for Checkout — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.
| Agent hints | Context7 (634) |
|---|---|
| APIs analyzed | 1 — Checkout.com API Reference |