Tavilytavily.com
Tavily's API program has a strong, machine-readable contract as its foundation — but partners and their agents face a steep climb from that foundation to a first working integration. The most urgent gap is a complete absence of self-service onboarding infrastructure: no developer portal, no quickstart, and no code samples mean partners cannot get hands-on without direct support.
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about4 pass1 warn0 fail94A+
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Schema coverage & depthvia sdk | 25/25 | package.json "types" → ./dist/index.d.ts. Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 83%. | 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 | 18.8/25 | info.version="1.0.0" set but no versioning scheme (URL / header / media type) detected. Investigated: spec 75%, docs 50%. | 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 0%. | No leaked secrets, no critical lint violations, no OWASP API Top-10 spec smells, and a published vulnerability-disclosure channel. |
| pass | Example coveragevia spec | 10/10 | 86% example coverage across params + responses. Investigated: spec 100%, sdk 100%, docs 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 examples2 pass0 warn3 fail49F
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Description completenessvia spec | 15/15 | 75% 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://docs.tavily.com/changelog. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%, sdk 100%. | 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 | 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 | 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 docs4 pass0 warn0 fail100A+
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | llms.txt present, valid & comprehensivevia docs | 30/30 | llms.txt found at https://docs.tavily.com/llms.txt. Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 0%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
| pass | Docs reachable, not hard auth-gatedvia docs | 30/30 | All 50 sampled pages are publicly accessible. Investigated: docs 100%. | Agents can only index and fetch docs they can reach — past auth gates and over correct HTTP semantics. |
| pass | Registry & SDK presencevia docs | 28/28 | Indexed on Context7 (websites/tavily, 2667 snippets). Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 67%, cli 50%, mcp 0%, wellknown 0%. | Listing in MCP registries and publishing SDKs puts the API where agents and their tooling look. |
| pass | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 12/12 | Docs paths crawlable by all monitored AI agents. Investigated: wellknown 100%. | 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 pass2 warn1 fail70B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via docs | 28/28 | 10 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. |
| warn | Agent-navigable, token-efficient docsvia docs | 16.5/22 | 1 of 50 pages have substantive content differences between markdown and HTML (avg 3% missing). Investigated: docs 75%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| pass | Agent instructions file (AGENTS.md)via wellknown | 10/10 | Agent instructions file found at https://tavily.com/AGENTS.md. Investigated: wellknown 100%. | An AGENTS.md gives coding agents explicit setup, auth, and usage instructions to interpret and operate the API — beyond llms.txt's link index. |
| pass | Docs structured datavia docs | 8/8 | JSON-LD Article markup on 18/18 assessed pages (100%) 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. |
| warn | Description consistency across surfaces | 0.6/7 | Mean pairwise description similarity across 2 surfaces (spec, docs) is 3% (threshold 35% for full credit). | Every surface tells the same story about what the product is. |
| fail | Operation purpose clarityvia spec | 0/25 | 0% of operations are agent-inferable. Investigated: spec 0%. | Agents select the right endpoint from its summary + operationId; clear, named operations make tool-selection reliable — the strongest driver of correct tool choice. |
Agent UsabilityAgents have the context to use your APIs reliably, not just find them2 pass1 warn1 fail79B
| 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 | Rate-limit signalingvia spec | 22/22 | rate-limit behavior documented in the docs site at https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/rate-limits. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | Machine-readable rate-limit headers let agents throttle adaptively. |
| warn | Sandbox separationvia sdk | 10/20 | No test-mode flag or sandbox environment is exposed. Investigated: sdk 50%, spec 0%, docs 0%. | 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 | 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 Tavily — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.
| Agent hints | Context7 (2,667) |
|---|---|
| APIs analyzed | 1 — Tavily Search and Extract API |