# Ably — API Agent Score

> Score: 68/100 (Grade: C) | Domain: ably.com | Rubric: 1.0.0 | Checked: July 24, 2026

Ably scored 68/100 (C), classified "partially-ready".

[View full report](https://www.postman.com/ai/ai-ready-apis/company/ably)
[All organizations](https://www.postman.com/ai/ai-ready-apis/llms.txt)

## Summary

- Overall: 68/100 (C)
- Classification: partially-ready

## Category Scores

- API Design: 73/100 (B)
- Developer Experience: 52/100 (D)
- Agent Discovery: 75/100 (B)
- Agent Understanding: 60/100 (C)
- Agent Usability: 78/100 (B)

## Check Results

### API Design

- [warn] Schema coverage & depth — 31/34 (91%) public params are fully typed (no any/**kwargs). Analyzer reports not all methods have a derivable input schema. Investigated: sdk 92%, spec 83%.
- [warn] Machine-readable, versioned contract — info.version="4.0.0" set but no versioning scheme (URL / header / media type) detected. Investigated: spec 75%, docs 50%.
- [pass] Security & governance hygiene — No credential-shaped strings detected in spec. Investigated: spec 100%, wellknown 100%.
- [pass] Example coverage — 74% example coverage (target 80%+). Investigated: spec 100%, sdk 100%.
- [fail] Auth declared & discoverable — No securitySchemes declared. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%.

### Developer Experience

- [pass] Description completeness — 100% of operations + parameters have substantive descriptions. Investigated: spec 100%, sdk 68%.
- [pass] Changelog published — Newest official SDK activity 0 day(s) ago. Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%.
- [fail] Self-service developer portal — No signup page detected across conventional paths (/signup, /sign-up, /register, /get-started, /console/signup, /dashboard/signup, /try, /try-free, /free, /free-trial, /start, /start-free). Investigated: docs 0%.
- [fail] Quickstart present — No quickstart/getting-started page found at the conventional paths. Investigated: docs 0%.
- [skip] Code samples in docs — No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run.

### Agent Discovery

- [pass] Registry & SDK presence — Indexed on Context7 (websites/ably, 45656 snippets). Investigated: docs 100%, cli 100%, sdk 92%.
- [warn] Docs reachable, not hard auth-gated — Server ignores Accept: text/markdown header (0/50 sampled pages return markdown); 50 rate-limited (HTTP 429). Investigated: docs 75%.
- [warn] llms.txt present, valid & comprehensive — Could not test any pages; 50 failed to fetch. Investigated: docs 43%, sdk 0%.
- [warn] Crawlable / AEO — No sitemap discoverable via robots.txt or /sitemap.xml on the docs host. Investigated: wellknown 50%.

### Agent Understanding

- [pass] Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457) — 5 distinct 4xx/5xx response codes documented. Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 100%, spec 50%.
- [warn] Agent-navigable, token-efficient docs — Could not fetch HTML for any pages to compare; 25 failed to fetch. Investigated: docs 70%.
- [warn] Description consistency across surfaces — Mean pairwise description similarity across 2 surfaces (spec, sdk) is 2% (threshold 35% for full credit).
- [fail] Operation purpose clarity — 0% of operations are agent-inferable. Investigated: spec 0%.
- [fail] Agent instructions file (AGENTS.md) — No AGENTS.md at the site root or /.well-known/. Investigated: wellknown 0%.
- [skip] Docs structured data — No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run.

### Agent Usability

- [pass] Idempotency documented — Built-in retry machinery is present (grep-derived). Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%.
- [pass] Pagination documented & consistent — Pagination params detected on 1 list endpoint(s). Investigated: docs 100%, spec 75%, sdk 50%.
- [pass] Sandbox separation — Sandbox environments are exposed (sandbox). Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%.
- [warn] Runnable collection with test scripts — No test scripts found in the workspace's collections. Investigated: platform 50%.
- [fail] Rate-limit signaling — No rate-limit response headers documented. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%.

## Executive Summary

Ably's API program shows strength in core API design and schema quality, but two areas are holding back partner success: onboarding is friction-heavy (no self-service portal, no quickstart), and AI agents lack the structured context they need to understand and act on Ably's APIs without guesswork. Fixing the self-service onboarding gap and enriching agent-facing documentation should be the immediate priorities — together they determine whether partners and their agents can get to productive integrations independently, or whether every engagement still requires a sales conversation.