# GoCardless — API Agent Score

> Score: 81/100 (Grade: A) | Domain: gocardless.com | Rubric: 1.0.0 | Checked: July 24, 2026

GoCardless scored 81/100 (A), classified "ai-ready".

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

## Summary

- Overall: 81/100 (A)
- Classification: ai-ready

## Category Scores

- API Design: 94/100 (A+)
- Developer Experience: 59/100 (D)
- Agent Discovery: 82/100 (A)
- Agent Understanding: 73/100 (B)
- Agent Usability: 95/100 (A+)

## Check Results

### API Design

- [pass] Auth declared & discoverable — Authentication required (global or on every operation). Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%.
- [warn] Schema coverage & depth — 71/71 (100%) public params are fully typed (no any/**kwargs). Analyzer confirms all methods have a derivable input schema. Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 58%.
- [warn] Machine-readable, versioned contract — info.version="1.0.0" 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 50%.
- [pass] Example coverage — 100% example coverage across params + responses. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%, sdk 100%.

### Developer Experience

- [pass] Code samples in docs — Code samples in 10 language(s) across docs (top: http, ruby, javascript); 9/20 pages have ≥ 2 languages on the same page. Investigated: docs 100%.
- [pass] Description completeness — 83% description completeness (target 90%+). Investigated: spec 100%, sdk 0%.
- [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%.

### Agent Discovery

- [pass] Registry & SDK presence — Indexed on Context7 (websites/developer_gocardless, 4923 snippets). Investigated: docs 100%, sdk 100%, cli 100%, mcp 0%, wellknown 0%.
- [warn] Docs reachable, not hard auth-gated — 2 of 50 sampled pages return 200 for non-existent URLs (soft 404). Investigated: docs 75%.
- [warn] llms.txt present, valid & comprehensive — No llms.txt directive found in HTML of any of 50 sampled pages. Investigated: docs 63%, sdk 0%.
- [warn] Crawlable / AEO — Sitemap present (1 entries) but carries no lastmod values. Investigated: wellknown 75%.

### Agent Understanding

- [pass] Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457) — Single base error "ApiError" with 22 subclasses. Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%.
- [pass] Operation purpose clarity — 100% of operations have a clear summary + operationId an agent can select on. Investigated: spec 100%.
- [warn] Agent-navigable, token-efficient docs — 1 of 50 sampled pages appear to be client-side rendered SPA shells (___gatsby detected); agents using HTTP fetches will see no content. Investigated: docs 65%.
- [warn] Description consistency across surfaces — Mean pairwise description similarity across 2 surfaces (spec, sdk) is 2% (threshold 35% for full credit).
- [fail] Agent instructions file (AGENTS.md) — No AGENTS.md at the site root or /.well-known/. Investigated: wellknown 0%.
- [fail] Docs structured data — Neither JSON-LD nor OpenGraph/meta tags detected across 1 assessed pages (1 JS-rendered). Investigated: docs 0%.

### Agent Usability

- [pass] Idempotency documented — Built-in retry machinery is present (grep-derived). Investigated: sdk 100%, spec 0%, docs 0%.
- [pass] Rate-limit signaling — 3 distinct rate-limit response headers documented. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%.
- [pass] Sandbox separation — Sandbox server declared but no distinguishable test credentials in scheme descriptions. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%, sdk 100%.
- [warn] Runnable collection with test scripts — No test scripts found in the workspace's collections. Investigated: platform 50%.
- [skip] Pagination documented & consistent — No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run.

## Executive Summary

GoCardless has a strong API design foundation and good agent discoverability, but two areas are holding back partner program outcomes: agents and AI coding tools lack the structured context they need to integrate reliably, and partners face friction in self-serve onboarding due to the absence of a dedicated developer portal and quickstart experience. Closing the agent-context and onboarding gaps should be the immediate priority — fixing these will accelerate partner time-to-integration and reduce support burden across the program.