Foursquarefoursquare.com
Foursquare's API program shows solid fundamentals in onboarding and documentation reachability, but two areas demand immediate attention to protect partner and agent outcomes. Security governance gaps in the API design create trust and compliance risks that can block enterprise partner deals before they start, while the absence of a changelog, agent instruction file, and runnable collection leaves partners — and the AI agents they increasingly rely on — without the context needed to integrate confidently and keep pace with API changes.
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about1 pass1 warn1 fail61C
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| warn | Schema coverage & depthvia sdk | 15/25 | 0/141 (0%) public params are fully typed (no any/**kwargs). Analyzer reports not all methods have a derivable input schema. Investigated: sdk 60%. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| pass | Example coveragevia sdk | 10/10 | README is present and includes a runnable quickstart. Investigated: sdk 100%. | 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 examples2 pass1 warn1 fail74B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 29/29 | Self-service signup at https://app.foursquare.com/signup; no free tier or sandbox language detected. Investigated: docs 100%. | Self-serve key/account creation is the fast first call for partners, with no sales gate. |
| pass | Description completenessvia sdk | 15/15 | 69/69 operations carry a description. Investigated: sdk 100%. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| warn | Quickstart presentvia docs | 12.5/25 | Quickstart page reachable (2 variants scanned starting at https://docs.foursquare.com/) but no runnable code sample detected in HTML or .md variant. Investigated: docs 50%. | A quickstart is the fastest path from landing page to first successful call. |
| fail | Changelog publishedvia sdk | 0/13 | Official SDKs stale: newest activity 548 days ago. Investigated: sdk 0%. | A published changelog lets partners track changes without surprise. |
| na | Code samples in docs | —/18 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | 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 fail73B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Registry & SDK presencevia docs | 28/28 | Indexed on Context7 (websites/foursquare, 8737 snippets). Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 50%, cli 0%. | Listing in MCP registries and publishing SDKs puts the API where agents and their tooling look. |
| warn | llms.txt present, valid & comprehensivevia docs | 18/30 | Could not test any pages; 1 failed to fetch. Investigated: docs 60%, sdk 0%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
| warn | Docs reachable, not hard auth-gatedvia docs | 15/30 | 1 JavaScript redirect(s) detected across 1 pages. Investigated: docs 50%. | Agents can only index and fetch docs they can reach — past auth gates and over correct HTTP semantics. |
| warn | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 6/12 | No sitemap discoverable via robots.txt or /sitemap.xml on the docs host. 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 docs1 pass1 warn1 fail77B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via sdk | 28/28 | Single base error "FoursquareException" with 11 subclasses. Investigated: sdk 100%. | RFC 9457 problem details and a documented error-code inventory let agents parse failures without burning tokens. |
| warn | Agent-navigable, token-efficient docsvia docs | 15.1/22 | No pages support .md URLs (0/1 tested). Investigated: docs 69%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| 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 | 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 1 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 pass1 warn1 fail72B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Idempotency documentedvia sdk | 27/27 | Built-in retry machinery is present (grep-derived). Investigated: sdk 100%. | Documented idempotency lets agents retry safely. |
| warn | Sandbox separationvia sdk | 10/20 | No test-mode flag or sandbox environment is exposed. Investigated: sdk 50%. | An isolated environment lets agents exercise destructive operations 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. |
Resources Discovered
The public resources we found for Foursquare — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.
| Agent hints | Context7 (8,737) |
|---|