How to Evaluate APIs for AI Agents: A 20-Dimension Framework

Most people are asking the wrong question. When they say an API or tool is "agent-ready," they often mean the website is easy for AI systems to crawl or cite. That matters for discoverability, but it tells you very little about what actually happens when an autonomous agent tries to use the API in production. The real question is simpler and harsher: Will this API still work when my agent calls it at 3am with no human supervision? That depends on operational details like auth friction, retry safety, error quality, schema stability, and sandbox support — not just website metadata. The wrong question everyone's asking Search for "agent compatibility scoring" and you'll find tools that scan websites for AI crawlability — whether your site has llms.txt, structured data, or robots.txt rules for GPTBot. That's useful if you're optimizing a marketing page for ChatGPT citations. But if you're building an AI agent that needs to use an API — send an email, process a payment, query a database — w