Ipumsipums.org
Ipums has a solid documentation foundation and good discoverability basics, but two areas put the partner program at real risk: agents and partners cannot execute real workflows against the API (no runnable collection exists), and the API surface is nearly invisible to AI-powered tooling — missing the machine-readable files that allow agents to find, understand, and act on your APIs without a sales conversation. Fixing agent discoverability and runnable access first will unlock self-serve partner onboarding and make Ipums APIs first-class citizens in AI-assisted development workflows.
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about1 pass0 warn1 fail55D
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Example coveragevia docs | 10/10 | Code samples appear on 3 of 20 sampled docs pages across 2 language(s), but broader multi-language coverage is missing. Investigated: docs 100%. | Examples carry shape semantics schemas under-specify — for humans and agents alike. |
| fail | Security & governance hygienevia wellknown | 0/15 | No security.txt found at /.well-known/security.txt or /security.txt, so there's no machine-readable security contact for agents or researchers. Investigated: wellknown 0%. Fix: Publish an RFC 9116 security.txt with a Contact line and a future Expires date. | No leaked secrets, no critical lint violations, no OWASP API Top-10 spec smells, and a published vulnerability-disclosure channel. |
| na | Machine-readable, versioned contract | —/25 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | A current OpenAPI version with a declared versioning scheme lets agents reason about the contract. |
| na | Schema coverage & depth | —/25 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| na | Auth declared & discoverable | —/25 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Agents can only call an API when they can determine its auth posture — a declared scheme, or an explicit statement that none is required. |
Developer ExperienceThe context both developers and agents need to integrate fast — onboarding, code samples, complete descriptions and worked examples2 pass0 warn1 fail72B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 29/29 | Signup page found at https://developer.ipums.org/docs/v2/get-started/, but no free tier or sandbox is documented in docs/pricing, so an agent may hit a paywall. Investigated: docs 100%. | A first call without a human in the loop — self-serve credentials, a free tier, or an API that needs none. |
| pass | Code samples in docsvia docs | 18/18 | Code samples appear on 3 of 20 sampled docs pages across 2 language(s), but broader multi-language coverage is missing. Investigated: docs 100%. | Multi-language samples shorten time-to-first-call. |
| fail | Quickstart presentvia docs | 0/25 | No quickstart or getting-started page found at the conventional docs paths, so new developers and agents have no obvious first step. Investigated: docs 0%. Fix: Publish a single-page quickstart that goes from zero to a first successful API call. | A quickstart is the fastest path from landing page to first successful call. |
| na | Description completeness | —/15 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| na | Changelog published | —/13 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | A published changelog lets partners track changes without surprise. |
Agent DiscoveryPartners and their agents can find your APIs — llms.txt, registries, crawlable and reachable docs2 pass1 warn1 fail70B
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Registry & SDK presencevia docs | 28/28 | Indexed on Context7 (ipums/ipumspy, 296 snippets). Investigated: docs 100%, cli 100%, sdk 0%. | Listing in MCP registries and publishing SDKs puts the API where agents and their tooling look. |
| warn | Docs reachable, not hard auth-gatedvia docs | 22.5/30 | Server ignores Accept: text/markdown header (0/46 pages return markdown); 1 returned error pages. Investigated: docs 75%. | Agents can only index and fetch docs they can reach — past auth gates and over correct HTTP semantics. |
| pass | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 12/12 | robots.txt lets all monitored AI crawlers reach the docs paths. Investigated: wellknown 100%. | Bots allowed plus a fresh sitemap make docs findable by agent crawlers. |
| fail | llms.txt present, valid & comprehensivevia docs | 0/30 | No llms.txt found at any candidate location (https://developer.ipums.org/llms.txt, https://developer.ipums.org/docs/llms.txt). Investigated: docs 0%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
Agent UnderstandingAgents can correctly interpret your APIs — machine-readable errors, consistent descriptions, structured data, parseable docs0 pass2 warn1 fail62C
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| warn | Agent-navigable, token-efficient docsvia docs | 16.6/22 | No pages support .md URLs (0/46 tested). Investigated: docs 76%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| warn | Docs structured datavia docs | 4/8 | Only OpenGraph/meta tags across 19 assessed pages — no JSON-LD for AI answer engines to cite. Investigated: docs 50%. Fix: Emit JSON-LD with Article/TechArticle @type and dateModified in the rendered docs head. | Structured data (JSON-LD/schema.org) on docs pages gives agents an unambiguous parse target and is what answer engines cite. Detected on the JS-rendered head (Firecrawl) for a bounded page budget, so JS-injected JSON-LD is now caught; pages we can't render are excluded rather than failed. |
| fail | Agent instructions file (AGENTS.md)via wellknown | 0/10 | No AGENTS.md at the site root or /.well-known/, so coding agents have no ready-made setup and usage instructions. Investigated: wellknown 0%. Fix: Publish an AGENTS.md with setup, auth, and usage instructions a coding agent can follow. | An AGENTS.md gives coding agents explicit setup, auth, and usage instructions to interpret and operate the API — beyond llms.txt's link index. |
| na | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457) | —/28 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | RFC 9457 problem details and a documented error-code inventory let agents parse failures without burning tokens. |
| na | Operation purpose clarity | —/25 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Agents select the right endpoint from its summary + operationId; clear, named operations make tool-selection reliable — the strongest driver of correct tool choice. |
| na | Description consistency across surfaces | —/7 | Only 1 surface description(s) with ≥6 tokens available; need at least 2 to compare. | Every surface tells the same story about what the product is. |
Agent UsabilityAgents have the context to use your APIs reliably, not just find them0 pass0 warn1 fail40F
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fail | Runnable collection with test scriptsvia platform | 0/9 | No public Postman workspace found for the org, so there's no runnable collection an agent can execute against. Investigated: platform 0%. Fix: Publish at least one public Postman workspace and link it from your developer portal so agents can use Run-in-Postman. | A public, maintained collection with assertions is runnable truth agents validate against. |
| na | Idempotency documented | —/27 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Documented idempotency lets agents retry safely. |
| na | Rate-limit signaling | —/22 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Machine-readable rate-limit headers let agents throttle adaptively. |
| na | Pagination documented & consistent | —/22 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Consistent, documented pagination lets agents traverse collections. |
| na | Sandbox separation | —/20 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | An isolated environment lets agents exercise destructive operations safely. |
Resources Discovered
The public resources we found for Ipums — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.
| Agent hints | Context7 (296) |
|---|