---
title: "Rakuten: the 360 agent-readiness check | Agent Ready Checkout"
description: "Rakuten on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-14: 47 of 100, grade D. The pay layer did not apply. One company a day."
canonical: https://agentreadycheckout.com/blog/rakuten-agent-readiness
site: "Agent Ready Checkout"
last_updated: 2026-11-14
date: 2026-11-09
section: "360 checks"
---

# Rakuten: the 360 agent-readiness check | Agent Ready Checkout

> Rakuten on Ora's agent-readiness scan, read 2026-11-14: 47 of 100, grade D. The pay layer did not apply. One company a day.

Source: https://agentreadycheckout.com/blog/rakuten-agent-readiness
Site: Agent Ready Checkout
Last reviewed: 2026-11-14

360 check, 9 Nov 2026

# Rakuten on the pay layer: the 360 agent-readiness check

In short

Rakuten scores 47 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, a D, read 14 Nov 2026. The six payment checks did not apply to rakuten.com on this read, which is how Ora treats a site it does not read as a shop. A specification at /v2/api-docs, under a robots.txt that says nothing about AI.

On 14 Nov 2026 the public site at rakuten.com scored **47 of 100** on [Ora's](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycheckout.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) agent-readiness scan, a D, in Ora's Identity & Auth category. Rakuten is the Japanese group's shopping and cash-back site for the United States, 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.

## The score

| Layer | Points | Share | What the layer asks |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Discovery | 9 of 11 | 82% | Can agents find and recommend it |
| Access | 28.67 of 43 | 67% | Can agents read it |
| Usability | 7.43 of 50 | 15% | Can agents use it |
| Payments | 0 of 0 | none apply | Can agents pay |
|  |
| Total | 47 of 100 | 47% | Grade D |

## The pay layer

Ora did not run the six payment checks against rakuten.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 marketplace 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 rakuten.com, grouped by layer, with the result, the points and what Ora recorded where its wording passes this site's gate.

### Discovery: 9 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 | Pass | 4 of 4 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| Brand name discoverability | Pass | 3 of 3 | rakuten.com ranks #1 for "Rakuten coupons" and #1 for "Rakuten cash back" |
| 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 | Fail | 0 of 1 | No NPM or PyPI SDK package found |
| 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: 28.67 of 43

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Sitemap exists | Pass | 1 of 1 | Valid sitemap found at https://www.rakuten.com/sitemap-index.xml with multiple sitemaps entries |
| Content without JavaScript | Partial | 1.67 of 5 | Homepage: 9402 chars, semantic headings (1 H1 + 8 H2s + 9 H3s), 8.0% content ratio. Sampled pages with almost no text without JavaScript (1 of 4): https://go.rakuten.com/open-app (152 chars). |
| 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 | Pass | 1 of 1 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| 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://rakuten.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, /extension/llms.txt, /mobile/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://rakuten.com/. Declared policy only |
| llms.txt exists | Fail | 0 of 1 | No llms.txt found at https://rakuten.com/llms.txt. Publish it at the site root, where agents that follow the llms.txt spec look for it. |
| llms.txt formatting | Fail | 0 of 2 | No llms.txt found to evaluate quality |
| JSON-LD structured data | Partial | 0.5 of 2 | JSON-LD found (1 block(s)) but no identity type - use SoftwareApplication, Product, Organization, Person, or Article so agents can tell what this site is |
| Pricing info accessible | Fail | 0 of 3 | No pricing page or pricing data found |
| Public API/docs linked from homepage | Pass | 4 of 4 | Documentation site found at https://developers.rakuten.com |
| Agent instruction / when-to-use | Fail | 0 of 1 | No agent instruction file with when-to-use guidance found |
| Skills.sh skill quality | Partial | 1 of 2 | Skills.sh presence exists but limited - 6 installs (goal: 200+) |
| JSON-LD entity linking (sameAs) | Fail | 0 of 1 | No sameAs entity linking in JSON-LD - agents cannot disambiguate your brand |
| Metadata completeness | Partial | 0.5 of 1 | 3/4 metadata signals present - missing: HTML lang attribute |
| Organization schema completeness | Fail | 0 of 1 | No Organization type found in JSON-LD |
| Trust anchor pages | Pass | 1 of 1 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| 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 | Pass | 1 of 1 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| Page token budget | Pass | 1 of 1 | All 5 measured pages fit an agent context budget (largest ~3K tokens) |
| Content starts near the top | Partial | 0 of 1 | Main content starts late on 1 of 3 measured pages: https://developers.rakuten.com/stories/ (39% in). Put navigation after the main content in the markup, or trim it, so an agent that cuts the page keeps the content. |
| Content behind auth | Pass | 1 of 1 | All 1 sampled page is publicly readable (0 with substantive content) |
| OpenAPI spec published | Pass | 8 of 8 | OpenAPI spec found at /v2/api-docs (version: 2.0) |
| Developer portal | Pass | 5 of 5 | Developer portal found at https://developers.rakuten.com |
| 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://rakuten.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: 7.43 of 50

| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Public API with reachable endpoints | Partial | 3.43 of 8 | API described in documentation at https://developers.rakuten.com but no machine-verifiable API surface confirmed. Best-of-protocols score: 3/7. |
| OAuth 2.0 support | Partial | 2 of 5 | OAuth mentioned on homepage but no standard endpoints found |
| 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: free tier available, 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: rakuten.com, api.rakuten.com. |
| Agent auth WWW-Authenticate hint | Fail | 0 of 1 | No 401 with WWW-Authenticate: Bearer resource_metadata=... found. Probed [https://rakuten.com/api, https://rakuten.com/api/v1, https://rakuten.com/v1, https://rakuten.com/v2, https://rakuten.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 | Fail | 0 of 3 | No CLI tool found |
| 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 | Partial, no detail recorded. |
| Native interactive controls | Pass | 3 of 3 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| Accessible names on controls | Pass | 2 of 2 | Pass, no detail recorded. |
| 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 Rakuten.

MCP server / manifest

Fail, 0 of 10, about 8.9 points to gain. Ora saw: No MCP server or manifest found.

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.

Scoped permissions

Fail, 0 of 5, about 4.4 points to gain. Ora saw: No declared OAuth scopes, security schemes, or scoped-permission documentation found.

Public API with reachable endpoints

Partial, 3.43 of 8, about 4.1 points to gain. Ora saw: API described in documentation at https://developers.rakuten.com but no machine-verifiable API surface confirmed. Best-of-protocols score: 3/7.

CLI tool available

Fail, 0 of 3, about 2.7 points to gain. Ora saw: No CLI tool found.

## Our read

Rakuten's US site is the one in this batch with an OpenAPI specification, version 2.0 at /v2/api-docs, beside a developer portal at developers.rakuten.com and a valid sitemap index, and Ora reads the domain in its Identity and Auth category rather than as a shop, so the six payment checks did not apply. The door is open to all six agent user agents, but robots.txt carries no AI crawler directives at all, which the policy row scores as a fail rather than as permission. The home page gives 6,231 characters with an H1 and a flat heading structure, and a JSON-LD block with no identity type; there is no llms.txt at either location. On the act layer the API is described without a machine-verifiable surface, OAuth is mentioned without standard endpoints, and Ora found no MCP server. The brand search placed the domain second for its identity term. A cash-back site is the kind of surface an agent would use on a shopper's behalf, and the specification is already there.

## Test your own checkout

The scan above is free and needs no account: enter a domain at [ora.ai](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=agentreadycheckout.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check) and read the same layers for your own site, with the six payment checks mapped to this matrix on [the Ora Payments page](https://agentreadycheckout.com/method/ora-payments-layer). 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](https://agentreadycheckout.com/guides/best-ai-readiness-tools-2026).

```bash
npx ax@0.10 audit https://example.com --min-score 70
```

[All 360 checks](https://agentreadycheckout.com/blog), one company a day. Corrections to [the corrections page](https://agentreadycheckout.com/corrections).

## Sources

1.  [ora.ai/api/score/rakuten.com, Ora's scan (vendor)](https://ora.ai/api/score/rakuten.com?utm_source=agentreadycheckout.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check), read 14 Nov 2026
2.  [Ora's scoring rules, version 3 (vendor)](https://ora.ai/api/ranker/releases/3/rules?utm_source=agentreadycheckout.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check), read 14 Nov 2026
3.  [Ora check catalog (GET /api/checks)](https://ora.ai/api/checks?utm_source=agentreadycheckout.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=check), read 14 Nov 2026
4.  [rakuten.com, the company's site](https://www.rakuten.com/), read 14 Nov 2026

Last reviewed 14 Nov 2026

## Edition

Matrix edition of 4 Nov 2026.

Reviewed 14 Nov 2026, [4 sources](#sources-h).

## Method

Every number on this page is read from Ora's score file for the domain on the date shown. The verdict is ours.

[Methodology](https://agentreadycheckout.com/method)