DocsConcepts / Standards: WebMCP, MCP, ARD, ACP, UCP

Standards: WebMCP, MCP, ARD, ACP, UCP

Before an agent reads your page, it checks whether your site has published what it can do. There are three places it looks, and the honest answer today is that almost no service business publishes to any of them.

A catalogue at a known address

A small file at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json listing what the business offers and how to act on it. Agent Readiness Discovery, published June 2026.

Tools declared by the page

The page itself tells the browser what it can do, so an agent using that browser can call it. WebMCP, from Google and Microsoft. It lives and dies with the open tab.

A permanent endpoint

A connection an agent can open any time, whether or not anyone has the site open. The Model Context Protocol. This is the one that keeps working at 2am.

Paying for it

When an agent has to pay for what it books, there is no single standard to pay through. Two are in the field: ACP, from Stripe and OpenAI, and UCP, from Shopify and Google. As of August 2026 the split is unresolved and merchants are being told to support both.

Frontlatch publishes to all three from one Action Graph, and follows the payment standards as they settle rather than picking a winner for you.

What the scan found

15 of 15

sites in our scan published none of the three

Fifteen Sydney service businesses, scanned read-only. No catalogue, no declared tools, no endpoint — on any of them.

Source: packages/scanner/benchmark/reports/ · 25 Aug 2026

Written from

  • The words on this pageapps/web/MESSAGE-ARCHITECTURE.md§12.5, verbatim.
  • The standards stack and their statusdocs/01-market-landscape.md§2. The source IA-SPEC.md §1.7 assigns to this route.
  • The measurementpackages/scanner/benchmark/reports/Fifteen Sydney service sites, 25 August 2026. Directory, not filenames.