360 check, 9 Nov 2026
Nordstrom on the pay layer: the 360 agent-readiness check
Nordstrom scores 20 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, an F, read 14 Nov 2026. The six payment checks did not apply to nordstrom.com on this read, which is how Ora treats a site it does not read as a shop. A home page that is 100 percent script, and an act layer with nothing in it.
On 14 Nov 2026 the public site at nordstrom.com scored 20 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, an F, in Ora's E-commerce category. Nordstrom is the US department store with a large online share of its sales, so this check reads the Payments layer first: the six checks that look for x402, MPP, UCP, ACP and AP2 on the domain, the same protocols this site's matrix tracks row by row. The other layers follow, with every check Ora ran and what it saw. Ora's one-line summary: Nordstrom's homepage renders its content with JavaScript and it has no public API, MCP server or developer portal, so agents get almost nothing to use.
The score
| Layer | Points | Share | What the layer asks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery | 4 of 11 | 36% | Can agents find and recommend it |
| Access | 10 of 43 | 23% | Can agents read it |
| Usability | 5 of 50 | 10% | Can agents use it |
| Payments | 0 of 0 | none apply | Can agents pay |
| Total | 20 of 100 | 20% | Grade F |
The pay layer
Ora did not run the six payment checks against nordstrom.com on this read: it marks them not applicable on a site it does not read as a shop, so the layer has no maximum and costs nothing. A retailer that sells online can still publish any of the five protocols; the matrix says which processors and platforms carry each one. Each protocol links to its matrix row, where the processors and platforms that carry it are dated and sourced.
| Payment check | Result | Points | Matrix row | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| x402 | Does not apply | 0 of 2 | x402 in the matrix | No x402 payment protocol support detected. No commerce signals detected - agent-payment protocols are optional for non-commerce sites |
| MPP | Does not apply | 0 of 2 | MPP in the matrix | No MPP (Machine Payments Protocol) support detected. No commerce signals detected - agent-payment protocols are optional for non-commerce sites |
| UCP | Does not apply | 0 of 3 | UCP in the matrix | no UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) signals detected. No commerce signals detected - agent-payment protocols are optional for non-commerce sites |
| ACP | Does not apply | 0 of 3 | ACP in the matrix | no ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) signals detected. No commerce signals detected - agent-payment protocols are optional for non-commerce sites |
The other layers, check by check
Every check Ora ran on nordstrom.com, grouped by layer, with the result, the points and what Ora recorded where its wording passes this site's gate.
Discovery: 4 of 11
| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|---|
| ARD discovery | Fail | 0 of 1 | No /.well-known/ard.json, no same-site rel="ard" link, and no legacy /.well-known/ai-catalog.json |
| Developer resource discoverability | Fail | 0 of 4 | In a search for your API docs, none of the 10 results is your official docs |
| Brand name discoverability | Partial | 1 of 3 | nordstrom.com ranks #8 for "nordstrom" (searched your brand name alone: no main product term from your homepage qualified) |
| robots.txt AI crawler policy | Pass | 1 of 1 | AI search crawlers: allowed in 3 of 3 checks (3 crawlers on 1 page). AI training crawlers: allowed in 2 of 2 checks (2 crawlers on 1 page), not scored. |
| NPM/PyPI SDK package | Pass | 1 of 1 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| Agent platform configs | Fail | 0 of 1 | Could not locate a public repo containing agent configs or rules. If our probes missed it, AI coding agents likely will too - link the repo from your homepage or docs so it's discoverable. |
| Agent Plugins manifest | Fail | 0 of 1 | No Agent Plugins manifest (plugin.json) found in discovered repos |
| ChatGPT app listed | Fail | 0 of 2 | Not found in ChatGPT app directory |
| Homepage not hidden from search | Pass | 1 of 1 | No noindex on the homepage: no robots, googlebot or bingbot meta tag and no X-Robots-Tag header hides it from search. |
Access: 10 of 43
| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sitemap exists | Pass | 1 of 1 | Valid sitemap found at https://www.nordstrom.com/sitemap.xml with multiple sitemaps entries |
| Content without JavaScript | Fail | 0 of 5 | Homepage: Very little text content (0 chars), and 100% of the page is script and it has almost no text: the content is rendered by JavaScript, so AI crawlers that run none see an empty page. |
| Not blocked by bot detection | Pass | 2 of 2 | Site accessible to 4 agent user-agents (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot). |
| Agent discovery file | Fail | 0 of 2 | No agent discovery file found |
| A2A / agent-card | Fail | 0 of 2 | No A2A agent card found at /.well-known/agent-card.json |
| Listed on skills.sh | Fail | 0 of 1 | No official skills self-published on skills.sh (3 community skills with potential relation to this domain found, but only self-published official skills count) |
| pricing.md exists | Fail | 0 of 2 | No pricing.md found - agents need machine-readable pricing to compare products and make purchase recommendations |
| NLWeb Schema Feeds | Fail | 0 of 1 | No schemamap: directive in robots.txt |
| MCP well-known discovery | Fail | 0 of 2 | No MCP server URL discovered |
| HTTP Link headers (RFC 8288) | Fail | 0 of 1 | No HTTP Link response headers (RFC 8288) found |
| Markdown URL fallback | Fail | 0 of 2 | Homepage does not support the .md suffix. Probed https://nordstrom.com/index.md and it did not return markdown (expected text/markdown content-type or a heading-led non-HTML body). |
| Modular llms.txt per product area | Fail | 0 of 1 | No section-level llms.txt found. Tried /docs/llms.txt, /api/llms.txt, /developers/llms.txt, /guides/llms.txt, /reference/llms.txt. This is a bonus check: it can add a point and never costs one. |
| robots.txt agent-user policy | Pass | 1 of 1 | No applicable crawl or usage restriction found for 3 user-triggered agents (chatgpt-user, claude-user, perplexity-user) on 1 public page: https://nordstrom.com/. Declared policy only |
| llms.txt exists | Fail | 0 of 1 | No llms.txt found at /llms.txt or /.well-known/llms.txt. |
| llms.txt formatting | Fail | 0 of 2 | No llms.txt found to evaluate quality |
| JSON-LD structured data | Fail | 0 of 2 | No JSON-LD structured data found on homepage |
| Pricing info accessible | Pass | 3 of 3 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| Public API/docs linked from homepage | Fail | 0 of 4 | No public API or documentation page linked from homepage |
| Agent instruction / when-to-use | Fail | 0 of 1 | No agent instruction file with when-to-use guidance found |
| Skills.sh skill quality | Fail | 0 of 2 | No official skills on skills.sh to evaluate |
| JSON-LD entity linking (sameAs) | Fail | 0 of 1 | No JSON-LD found - no entity linking possible |
| Metadata completeness | Fail | 0 of 1 | No metadata signals found - missing: canonical URL, HTML lang attribute, og:image, og:type |
| Organization schema completeness | Fail | 0 of 1 | No JSON-LD found - Organization schema missing |
| Trust anchor pages | Fail | 0 of 1 | No trust anchor pages found with sufficient content (About, Contact, Privacy) |
| Markdown alternate link | Fail | 0 of 1 | No sampled page advertises a markdown alternate. Add <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" href="..."> (or the equivalent Link response header) pointing at a markdown twin of the page. |
| Redirect hygiene | Partial | 0 of 1 | Redirect hygiene issues: the homepage looks like a JavaScript-redirect stub. Replace client-side redirects with HTTP redirects so non-JS agents follow them. |
| Page token budget | Pass | 1 of 1 | All 6 measured pages fit an agent context budget (largest ~1K tokens) |
| Content behind auth | Pass | 1 of 1 | All 5 sampled pages are publicly readable (0 with substantive content) |
| OpenAPI spec published | Fail | 0 of 8 | No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found |
| Developer portal | Fail | 0 of 5 | No developer portal found |
| API catalog (RFC 9727) | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /.well-known/api-catalog found (RFC 9727) |
| Markdown agent docs | Fail | 0 of 1 | Missing markdown content negotiation. Homepage returned text/html when probed with Accept: text/markdown (expected text/markdown), and none of the well-known root paths (/llms.md, /auth.md, /agents.md, /developers.md |
| Markdown content negotiation (acceptmarkdown.com) | Fail | 0 of 1 | Homepage https://nordstrom.com does not meet the Markdown negotiation requirements: Accept: text/markdown returned text/html; charset=utf-8; Vary header missing Accept (got "accept-encoding") |
| Bot-UA markdown serving | Fail | 0 of 1 | No probed bot User-Agent (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User) receives markdown when requesting HTML. Optional: detect AI-bot UAs server-side and serve them a markdown representation directly. |
| Agent crawler reachability | Pass | 1 of 1 | Reachable to every agent we tested - ChatGPT-User: reachable, OAI-SearchBot: reachable, Claude-User: reachable, PerplexityBot: reachable |
Usability: 5 of 50
| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public API with reachable endpoints | Fail | 0 of 8 | No publicly reachable API surface detected (REST and GraphQL both absent or auth-gated) |
| OAuth 2.0 support | Fail | 0 of 5 | No OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect support detected |
| Scoped permissions | Fail | 0 of 5 | No declared OAuth scopes, security schemes, or scoped-permission documentation found |
| Agent onboarding friction | Partial | 1 of 2 | Onboarding signals described but not verified live: sandbox/test environment |
| Web Bot Auth directory | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory found |
| auth.md exists | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /auth.md found at site root |
| auth.md structure | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /auth.md found at site root |
| Agent auth discovery metadata | Fail | 0 of 3 | Neither /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource nor /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server found. Probed: nordstrom.com, api.nordstrom.com. |
| Agent auth WWW-Authenticate hint | Fail | 0 of 1 | No 401 with WWW-Authenticate: Bearer resource_metadata=... found. Probed [https://nordstrom.com/api, https://nordstrom.com/api/v1, https://nordstrom.com/v1, https://nordstrom.com/v2, https://nordstrom.com/agent/identity |
| agent_auth endpoints reachable | Fail | 0 of 2 | No agent_auth endpoint URIs found in AS metadata or /auth.md prose; nothing to probe |
| MCP server / manifest | Fail | 0 of 10 | No MCP server or manifest found |
| WebMCP support | Fail | 0 of 8 | No WebMCP support detected - no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found |
| JSON error responses | Fail | 0 of 3 | API does not return JSON error responses (or no API detected) |
| CLI tool available | Pass | 3 of 3 | CLI package found on npm: serverless-artillery |
| NLWeb /ask endpoint | Fail | 0 of 1 | No NLWeb-conformant /ask endpoint found via GET or POST |
| NLWeb streaming support | Fail | 0 of 1 | NLWeb /ask does not support SSE streaming via GET or POST |
| MCP server-card.json | Fail | 0 of 2 | No MCP server card found (checked /.well-known/mcp/server-card.json, the site's ai-catalog.json, servers[].card in mcp.json, and <server>/server-card) |
| Product + docs MCP coverage | Fail | 0 of 2 | This bonus needs two MCP servers: one for your product so agents can take actions, and a separate one for your documentation so agents can answer questions from your docs. |
| Agent-friendly 404s | Partial | 1 of 2 | The nonexistent path https://nordstrom.com/__ora-404-probe-agcmakve correctly returns HTTP 404. Partial credit: no Markdown error body was detected. |
| Accessibility-tree injection safety (bonus) | Pass | 2 of 2 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| API schema complexity analysis | Fail | 0 of 2 | No API schema detected |
| Function calling compatibility | Fail | 0 of 2 | No API spec found - function calling requires discoverable endpoints |
The fixes worth most points
Ora attaches an estimate to each failing or partial check: how many points the site would gain by passing it. These are the 5 with the largest estimates for Nordstrom.
- MCP server / manifest
- Fail, 0 of 10, about 8.9 points to gain. Ora saw:
No MCP server or manifest found
. - Developer resource discoverability
- Fail, 0 of 4, about 8.1 points to gain. Ora saw:
In a search for your API docs, none of the 10 results is your official docs
. - Public API with reachable endpoints
- Fail, 0 of 8, about 7.1 points to gain. Ora saw:
No publicly reachable API surface detected (REST and GraphQL both absent or auth-gated)
. - WebMCP support
- Fail, 0 of 8, about 7.1 points to gain. Ora saw:
No WebMCP support detected - no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found
. - OpenAPI spec published
- Fail, 0 of 8, about 6.2 points to gain. Ora saw:
No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found
.
Our read
Nordstrom opens the door to all four agent user agents and shows them a page that is 100 percent script: zero characters of text without JavaScript, no JSON-LD and no llms.txt. robots.txt allows the search and training crawlers and the sitemap is valid, and that is the reading side in order. Ora read no commerce signals on one of the largest department store chains in the United States, so the six payment checks did not apply on this read. The act layer is empty: no publicly reachable API, and neither a developer portal nor an OpenAPI specification, neither an MCP server nor OAuth discovery, which is why the Usability layer reads 8 of 48. Discovery reads 5 of 11: a search for the API documentation returned no official page, 6.1 points, nordstrom.com ranks eighth for its own name, and the Wikipedia match could not be verified on this scan. A template that renders nothing is the first fix, and the cheapest.
Test your own checkout
The scan above is free and needs no account: enter a domain at ora.ai and read the same layers for your own site, with the six payment checks mapped to this matrix on the Ora Payments page. The command below runs the same audit from a terminal and exits with 1 under the score you set, so it can gate a deploy. Why Ora, and its limits.
npx ax@0.10 audit https://example.com --min-score 70All 360 checks, one company a day. Corrections to the corrections page.
Sources
- ora.ai/api/score/nordstrom.com, Ora's scan (vendor), read 14 Nov 2026
- Ora's scoring rules, version 3 (vendor), read 14 Nov 2026
- Ora check catalog (GET /api/checks), read 14 Nov 2026
- nordstrom.com, the company's site, read 14 Nov 2026
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