Schwabschwab.com
Schwab's API Design is a genuine strength — the contract is clean and well-typed, giving partners a solid foundation to build on. The critical gaps are in operational reliability and agent readiness: partners and their AI agents currently lack the runnable examples, error handling guidance, pagination and rate-limit contracts, and machine-readable context they need to self-serve integrations confidently.
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about3 pass2 warn0 fail90A+
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable, versioned contractvia spec | 25/25 | Versioning declared (info.version="1.0") and url-versioning detected. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | A current OpenAPI version with a declared versioning scheme lets agents reason about the contract. |
| pass | Auth declared & discoverablevia spec | 25/25 | Authentication required (global or on every operation). Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%, wellknown 50%. | Agents can only authenticate when auth is declared, scoped, and discoverable. |
| warn | Schema coverage & depthvia sdk | 18.2/25 | 25 of 84 public signatures use loose types (anyTypeRatio=0.298). Investigated: sdk 73%, spec 69%. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| pass | Security & governance hygienevia spec | 15/15 | No credential-shaped strings detected in spec. Investigated: spec 100%, wellknown 50%. | No leaked secrets, no critical lint violations, no OWASP API Top-10 spec smells, and a published vulnerability-disclosure channel. |
| warn | Example coveragevia sdk | 5/10 | README is present but has no runnable quickstart. Investigated: 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 examples1 pass1 warn2 fail53D
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 29/29 | Signup page at https://www.schwab.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 spec | 1.1/15 | 50% description completeness. Investigated: spec 7%, sdk 0%. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| fail | Quickstart presentvia docs | 0/25 | No quickstart/getting-started page found at the conventional paths. Investigated: docs 0%. | A quickstart is the fastest path from landing page to first successful call. |
| fail | Changelog publishedvia spec | 0/13 | No changelog URL or mention found in spec metadata. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 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 fail67C
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Registry & SDK presencevia docs | 28/28 | Indexed on Context7 (alexgolec/schwab-py, 165 snippets). Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 100%, cli 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 | 15/30 | 32 of 32 pages return 200 for non-existent URLs (soft 404). Investigated: docs 50%. | 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 | 10/30 | No llms.txt found at any candidate location (https://developer.schwab.com/llms.txt, https://developer.schwab.com/docs/llms.txt). Investigated: docs 33%, sdk 0%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
| 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 pass2 warn2 fail57D
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | 12.6/22 | No pages support .md URLs (0/32 tested). Investigated: docs 57%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| warn | Description consistency across surfaces | 1.4/7 | Mean pairwise description similarity across 2 surfaces (spec, sdk) is 7% (threshold 35% for full credit). | Every surface tells the same story about what the product is. |
| fail | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via spec | 0/28 | No 4xx/5xx response codes (or default error response) documented anywhere in the spec. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 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 | 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. |
Agent UsabilityAgents have the context to use your APIs reliably, not just find them1 pass0 warn4 fail45F
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | Pagination documented & consistentvia spec | 0/22 | 1 list endpoint(s) exist but no pagination params found. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | Consistent, documented pagination lets agents traverse collections. |
| 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 Schwab — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.