Clerkclerk.com
Clerk's API program has strong fundamentals in discovery and API design — partners can find and understand the contract surface without friction. However, two areas put partner integration success at risk: agents and coding tools lack the contextual instructions and consistent descriptions needed to generate correct, trustworthy integrations, and the absence of runnable collections with test scripts means partners must build blindly without validated workflows or clear operational guardrails around idempotency and rate limits.
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about4 pass1 warn0 fail98A+
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Schema coverage & depthvia sdk | 25/25 | 1/1 enums are named types (not bare strings). Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 61%. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| pass | Auth declared & discoverablevia spec | 25/25 | Authentication required (global or on every operation). Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | Agents can only authenticate when auth is declared, scoped, and discoverable. |
| warn | Machine-readable, versioned contractvia spec | 22.9/25 | info.version="v1" set but no versioning scheme (URL / header / media type) detected. Investigated: spec 92%, docs 83%. | A current OpenAPI version with a declared versioning scheme lets agents reason about the contract. |
| pass | Security & governance hygienevia spec | 15/15 | No credential-shaped strings detected in spec. Investigated: spec 100%, wellknown 100%. | No leaked secrets, no critical lint violations, no OWASP API Top-10 spec smells, and a published vulnerability-disclosure channel. |
| pass | Example coveragevia docs | 10/10 | Code samples in 3 language(s) across docs (top: shell, typescript, curl); 1/19 pages have ≥ 2 languages on the same page. Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 50%, spec 0%. | Examples carry shape semantics schemas under-specify — for humans and agents alike. |
Developer ExperienceThe context both developers and agents need to integrate fast — onboarding, code samples, complete descriptions and worked examples5 pass0 warn0 fail100A+
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 29/29 | Signup page at https://dashboard.clerk.com/sign-up; no free-tier language detected in docs/pricing. Investigated: docs 100%. | Self-serve key/account creation is the fast first call for partners, with no sales gate. |
| pass | Quickstart presentvia docs | 25/25 | Quickstart at https://clerk.com/docs/nextjs/getting-started/quickstart has a runnable sample in the .md variant (https://clerk.com/docs/nextjs/getting-started/quickstart.md). Investigated: docs 100%. | A quickstart is the fastest path from landing page to first successful call. |
| pass | Code samples in docsvia docs | 18/18 | Code samples in 3 language(s) across docs (top: shell, typescript, curl); 1/19 pages have ≥ 2 languages on the same page. Investigated: docs 100%. | Multi-language samples shorten time-to-first-call. |
| pass | Description completenessvia spec | 15/15 | 89% description completeness (target 90%+). Investigated: spec 100%. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| pass | Changelog publishedvia spec | 13/13 | changelog documented in the docs site at https://clerk.com/changelog. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%, sdk 100%. | A published changelog lets partners track changes without surprise. |
Agent DiscoveryPartners and their agents can find your APIs — llms.txt, registries, crawlable and reachable docs1 pass3 warn0 fail84A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Registry & SDK presencevia cli | 28/28 | Official CLI at clerk/cli with published releases (installable). Investigated: cli 100%, sdk 67%, docs 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 | 27/30 | 1 of 50 sampled pages require authentication (49 accessible). Investigated: docs 90%. | 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 | 20.6/30 | No llms.txt directive found in HTML of any of 50 sampled pages. Investigated: docs 69%, sdk 0%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
| warn | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 6/12 | robots.txt blocks 1 of 7 monitored AI crawlers on docs paths (ccbot). Investigated: wellknown 50%. | 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 docs3 pass1 warn2 fail79B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via docs | 28/28 | 11 distinct 4xx/5xx response codes documented. Investigated: docs 100%, spec 50%, sdk 50%. | RFC 9457 problem details and a documented error-code inventory let agents parse failures without burning tokens. |
| pass | Operation purpose clarityvia spec | 25/25 | 100% 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 | 13.4/22 | 22 of 50 pages have substantive content differences between markdown and HTML (avg 18% missing). Investigated: docs 61%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| pass | Docs structured datavia docs | 8/8 | JSON-LD Article markup on 10/15 assessed pages (67%) with dateModified present. Investigated: docs 100%. | 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. |
| 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. |
| fail | Description consistency across surfaces | 0/7 | Mean pairwise description similarity across 2 surfaces (spec, docs) is 0% (threshold 35% for full credit). | Every surface tells the same story about what the product is. |
Agent UsabilityAgents have the context to use your APIs reliably, not just find them2 pass0 warn3 fail56D
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Pagination documented & consistentvia spec | 22/22 | Pagination params detected on 8 list endpoint(s). Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | Consistent, documented pagination lets agents traverse collections. |
| pass | Sandbox separationvia sdk | 20/20 | Sandbox environments are exposed (sandbox). Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%. | An isolated environment lets agents exercise destructive operations safely. |
| fail | Idempotency documentedvia spec | 0/27 | 0% of mutating operations document idempotency. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%, sdk 0%. | Documented idempotency lets agents retry 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 Clerk — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.
| APIs analyzed | 3 — Clerk Backend API, Clerk Frontend API, Clerk Platform API |
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