UCP Is Not Enough:
Scanning Every Brand on checkout.directory
checkout.directory is doing something we genuinely love: tracking which brands have published a Universal Commerce Protocol manifest and holding a public record of who is showing up for agentic commerce. It is exactly the kind of community infrastructure this space needs. We scanned all 51 brands on their list to see how ready they actually are for an AI agent to complete a purchase. The answer, for every single one, is: not yet.
Having a UCP manifest is a meaningful first step. It signals intent and gives AI agents a machine-readable declaration of your commerce capabilities. But our data shows a consistent and significant gap between having UCP and being ready for an AI agent to actually discover your products, understand them, and complete a transaction without human intervention.
These are not obscure brands. Gymshark. Glossier. Skims. Everlane. All have UCP. All have average or above-average online stores. And all scored Not Ready when an agent tried to shop them autonomously.
Where the scores break down
The aggregate picture across all 51 sites reveals a telling pattern. Understandability (product content, schema markup, structured data) is strong. Discoverability and transactability are not.
Product content is largely there. These are mature brands with well-structured HTML and reasonable schema markup. The problem is everything before and after the product page: discovery infrastructure that lets agents crawl and index at scale, and programmatic APIs that let them add to cart, apply discounts, and check out without a browser.
Score distribution
Overall scores range from 21 to 85, with most sites clustered in the 41–80 band. No site crossed 90. The agentic readiness scores tell a starker story: the majority fall between 20 and 45.
The four gaps that UCP alone cannot close
What actually moves the score
The sites that score highest on agentic readiness share common traits: they expose structured product data across deep catalogue pages, not just the homepage; they have functioning cart APIs that respond to programmatic requests; and their bot protection is either absent or configured to allow verified agent traffic.
The sites that score lowest tend to have one or more of: heavy client-side rendering that prevents crawl, WAF or CAPTCHA protection that silently blocks agent requests, checkout flows that require JavaScript-heavy interactions, or simply no programmatic commerce infrastructure at all.
The UCP manifest declares that a store wants to participate in agentic commerce. But the gap between declaration and capability is, on average, substantial. These 49 brands have done something most retailers have not: they have published a machine-readable signal of intent. The infrastructure work is what remains.
Want to know where your store sits?
We scan e-commerce sites and tell you exactly what an AI agent can and cannot do on them. It's genuinely quite nerdy and we love it. Drop us a line if you want us to run the numbers on yours.
Get in touch →Data from all 51 sites listed on checkout.directory as of April 2026. Scores reflect the most recent completed scan per domain. Overall score is a weighted composite of discoverability (35%), understandability (40%), and transactability (25%). Agentic readiness measures how far an AI agent can progress through an 8-stage autonomous purchase journey. All scores are generated by Aidō Lighthouse and reflect the state of each site at time of scan.