Fordford.com
Ford's API program shows real strength in discovery and documentation quality, giving partners a solid front door. However, two areas are holding back partner and agent integration outcomes: agents cannot reliably parse or recover from errors (no machine-readable error bodies, no agent instructions file), and partners cannot confidently run real workflows (no idempotency guidance, no runnable collection with test scripts).
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about0 pass2 warn1 fail52D
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| warn | Schema coverage & depthvia sdk | 12.1/25 | 24/58 (41%) public params are fully typed (no any/**kwargs). Analyzer reports not all methods have a derivable input schema. Investigated: sdk 48%. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| warn | Example coveragevia sdk | 5/10 | README is present but has no runnable quickstart. Investigated: sdk 50%. | Examples carry shape semantics schemas under-specify — for humans and agents alike. |
| fail | Security & governance hygienevia wellknown | 0/15 | No security.txt at /.well-known/security.txt or /security.txt. Investigated: wellknown 0%. | No leaked secrets, no critical lint violations, no OWASP API Top-10 spec smells, and a published vulnerability-disclosure channel. |
| na | Machine-readable, versioned contract | —/25 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | A current OpenAPI version with a declared versioning scheme lets agents reason about the contract. |
| na | Auth declared & discoverable | —/25 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Agents can only authenticate when auth is declared, scoped, and discoverable. |
Developer ExperienceThe context both developers and agents need to integrate fast — onboarding, code samples, complete descriptions and worked examples1 pass1 warn0 fail86A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 29/29 | Signup page at https://www.ford.com/signup/; 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. |
| warn | Description completenessvia sdk | 8.1/15 | 35/76 operations lack a description. Investigated: sdk 54%. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| na | Quickstart present | —/25 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | A quickstart is the fastest path from landing page to first successful call. |
| na | Code samples in docs | —/18 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Multi-language samples shorten time-to-first-call. |
| na | Changelog published | —/13 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | A published changelog lets partners track changes without surprise. |
Agent DiscoveryPartners and their agents can find your APIs — llms.txt, registries, crawlable and reachable docs2 pass1 warn0 fail83A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | llms.txt present, valid & comprehensivevia docs | 30/30 | llms-full.txt reachable at https://ford.com/llms-full.txt. Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 0%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
| warn | Registry & SDK presencevia sdk | 14/28 | No MCP server, tool manifest, or list-tools capability is discoverable (server entrypoint: absent, tool manifest: unknown, list-tools: unknown). Investigated: sdk 50%, docs 0%, cli 0%. | Listing in MCP registries and publishing SDKs puts the API where agents and their tooling look. |
| pass | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 12/12 | Sitemap with 100% lastmod coverage; newest entry < 90 days old. Investigated: wellknown 100%. | Bots allowed plus a fresh sitemap make docs findable by agent crawlers. |
| na | Docs reachable, not hard auth-gated | —/30 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Agents can only index and fetch docs they can reach — past auth gates and over correct HTTP semantics. |
Agent UnderstandingAgents can correctly interpret your APIs — machine-readable errors, consistent descriptions, structured data, parseable docs0 pass0 warn2 fail40F
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fail | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via sdk | 0/28 | No single common SDK base error class was found; errors do not share one root. Investigated: sdk 0%. | RFC 9457 problem details and a documented error-code inventory let agents parse failures without burning tokens. |
| 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. |
| na | Operation purpose clarity | —/25 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Agents select the right endpoint from its summary + operationId; clear, named operations make tool-selection reliable — the strongest driver of correct tool choice. |
| na | Agent-navigable, token-efficient docs | —/22 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| na | Docs structured data | —/8 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | 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. |
| na | Description consistency across surfaces | —/7 | Only 0 surface description(s) with ≥6 tokens available; need at least 2 to compare. | Every surface tells the same story about what the product is. |
Agent UsabilityAgents have the context to use your APIs reliably, not just find them1 pass0 warn2 fail53D
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Sandbox separationvia sdk | 20/20 | Sandbox environments are exposed (sandbox). Investigated: sdk 100%. | An isolated environment lets agents exercise destructive operations safely. |
| fail | Idempotency documentedvia sdk | 0/27 | No built-in retry machinery was found; transient failures are not retried. Investigated: sdk 0%. | Documented idempotency lets agents retry safely. |
| 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. |
| na | Rate-limit signaling | —/22 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Machine-readable rate-limit headers let agents throttle adaptively. |
| na | Pagination documented & consistent | —/22 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Consistent, documented pagination lets agents traverse collections. |