Slack: the 360 agent-readiness check
Slack scores 54 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, a C, read 9 November 2026. Of the five surfaces an agent acts on, Ora found 2: a public API, OAuth. No MCP server, no manifest and no specification for the API every bot uses.
On 9 November 2026 the public site at slack.com scored 54 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, a C, in Ora's Communication & Support category. Ora probes a site the way an agent would: it requests pages with the agents' own user agents, reads robots.txt, looks for the files agents read, and tries the API, MCP and payment surfaces. This check reads the act layer first, because that is what the directory records, then the door, what an agent can read, and whether the company is found and recommended. Ora's one-line summary: Slack offers a published SDK and a ChatGPT app listing, but lacks an OpenAPI specification and an MCP server for agents to discover and call it.
The score
| Layer | Asks | Points | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Usability | Can agents use it | 25.5 of 74 | 34% |
| Access | Can agents read it | 36 of 58 | 62% |
| Discovery | Can agents find and recommend it | 14 of 17 | 82% |
| Payments | Can agents pay | 0 of 0 | none apply |
| Total | Grade C | 54 of 100 | 54% |
What an agent can do
The surfaces an agent acts on: an API it can find and call, an MCP server, an agent card, OAuth metadata, a command line. This is the layer the directory records, so it comes first.
In the directory, Slack sign-in required, tools not seen, not counted; the connector run of 4 November 2026 is on the entry page. Ora's MCP server check for the same domain reads fail; the two look for different things, the directory for a server that answers a handshake and lists tools, Ora for a server it can find from the site.
| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|---|
| MCP server / manifest mcp-server | Fail | 0 of 6 | No MCP server or manifest found |
| MCP well-known discovery mcp-well-known-discovery | Fail | 0 of 2 | No MCP server URL discovered |
| Public API with reachable endpoints public-api | Pass | 7 of 7 | REST API-related links found on homepage but no standard API path detected. GraphQL endpoint at https://graphql.slack.com/ is reachable; introspection requires authentication (API key / OAuth), |
| Public API/docs linked from homepage public-api-docs | Pass | 3 of 3 | API/docs link found on homepage and resolves: https://api.slack.com |
| Developer portal developer-portal | Pass | 6 of 6 | Developer portal found at /developers |
| OpenAPI spec published openapi-spec | Fail | 0 of 7 | No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found |
| API catalog (RFC 9727) api-catalog-rfc9727 | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /.well-known/api-catalog found (RFC 9727) |
| A2A / agent-card a2a-agent-card | Fail | 0 of 2 | No A2A agent card found at /.well-known/agent-card.json |
| Agent discovery file agent-discovery-file | Fail | 0 of 2 | No agent discovery file found |
| OAuth 2.0 support oauth-support | Pass | 5 of 5 | OpenID Connect discovery endpoint found at https://slack.com |
| OAuth Protected Resource metadata (RFC 9728) oauth-protected-resource | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource found (RFC 9728) |
| auth.md exists auth-md-exists | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /auth.md found at site root |
| WebMCP support webmcp | Fail | 0 of 5 | No WebMCP support detected - no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found |
| NLWeb /ask endpoint nlweb-ask | Fail | 0 of 1 | No NLWeb-conformant /ask endpoint found via GET or POST |
| CLI tool available cli-tool | Fail | 0 of 3 | No CLI tool found |
| Multi-language SDK packages rest-sdk-packages | Partial | 1 of 3 | SDK package found only in npm |
| Rate limit response headers rate-limit-headers | Fail | 0 of 2 | GraphQL introspection auth-gated and no header convention documented on GraphQL-tagged pages |
| Idempotency-Key support idempotency-key-support | Fail | 0 of 3 | GraphQL introspection auth-gated and no idempotency documentation found on GraphQL-tagged pages |
| JSON error responses json-error-responses | Fail | 0 of 4 | API does not return JSON error responses (or no API detected) |
At the door
What the site answers when a request arrives with an agent's user agent, and what robots.txt says to agents.
| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Not blocked by bot detection bot-detection | Pass | 2 of 2 | Site accessible to 4 agent user-agents (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot). |
| Agent crawler reachability agent-crawler-reachability | Pass | 2 of 2 | Reachable to every agent we tested - ChatGPT-User: reachable, OAI-SearchBot: reachable, Claude-User: reachable, PerplexityBot: reachable |
| robots.txt AI crawler policy robots-ai-policy-quality | Pass | 2 of 2 | AI search crawlers: allowed in 9 of 9 checks (3 crawlers on 3 pages). AI training crawlers: allowed in 6 of 6 checks (2 crawlers on 3 pages), not scored. |
| robots.txt agent-user policy robots-agent-user-policy | Pass | 2 of 2 | No applicable crawl or usage restriction found for 3 user-triggered agents (chatgpt-user, claude-user, perplexity-user) on 1 public page: https://slack.com/. Declared policy only; |
| Content behind auth docs-auth-gate | Pass | 2 of 2 | All 5 sampled pages are publicly readable (2 with substantive content) |
| Homepage not hidden from search noindex-directives | Pass | 1 of 1 | No noindex on the homepage: no robots, googlebot or bingbot meta tag and no X-Robots-Tag header hides it from search. |
| Redirect hygiene redirect-hygiene | Pass | 1 of 1 | no detail published |
| Web Bot Auth directory web-bot-auth-directory | Fail | 0 of 2 | No /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory found |
What an agent can read
Whether the text is in the first response, what the site publishes for agents, and how it describes itself to them.
| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content without JavaScript content-no-js | Partial | 2 of 3 | Homepage: 5480 chars with H1, but 4.7% content ratio is below the 5% target. 2 of 2 sampled inner pages have text without JavaScript (3 skipped). |
| Page token budget page-token-budget | Pass | 1 of 1 | All 3 measured pages fit an agent context budget (largest ~2K tokens) |
| Sitemap exists sitemap | Pass | 2 of 2 | Valid sitemap found at https://slack.com/sitemap.xml with multiple sitemaps entries |
| Sitemap freshness (lastmod) sitemap-lastmod | Fail | 0 of 1 | None of the 500 sampled sitemap entries carries a lastmod date. Add <lastmod> (W3C datetime) so agents can prioritize fresh content. |
| llms.txt exists llms-txt-exists | Pass | 1 of 1 | Found the llms.txt at https://slack.com/llms.txt. |
| llms.txt formatting llms-txt-formatting | Partial | 1 of 2 | The llms.txt at https://slack.com/llms.txt is well-formatted with markdown links, but at 40,604 characters it exceeds the 30,000-character recommendation for a navigation index. |
| llms.txt links resolve llms-txt-links-resolve | Partial | 1 of 2 | 2 of 5 probed llms.txt links do not resolve: https://slack.com/customer-stories and https://slack.com/trust |
| Markdown agent docs markdown-negotiation | Fail | 0 of 1 | Missing markdown content negotiation. Homepage returned text/html when probed with Accept: text/markdown (expected text/markdown), and none of the well-known root paths (/llms.md, /auth.md, /agents.md, /developers.md, |
| Markdown URL fallback markdown-url-fallback | Fail | 0 of 2 | Homepage does not support the .md suffix. Probed https://slack.com/index.md and it did not return markdown (expected text/markdown content-type or a heading-led non-HTML body). |
| Bot-UA markdown serving agent-ua-markdown | Fail | 0 of 1 | No probed bot User-Agent (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User) receives markdown when requesting HTML. Optional: detect AI-bot UAs server-side and serve them a markdown representation directly. |
| Agent mode view agent-mode-view | Pass | 2 of 2 | no detail published |
| JSON-LD structured data json-ld | Fail | 0 of 4 | No JSON-LD structured data found on homepage |
| Organization schema completeness org-schema-completeness | Fail | 0 of 2 | No JSON-LD found - Organization schema missing |
| JSON-LD entity linking (sameAs) json-ld-entity-linking | Fail | 0 of 2 | No JSON-LD found - no entity linking possible |
| Schema type breadth schema-type-breadth | Fail | 0 of 2 | No extended schema types found - AI can only answer basic questions about this entity |
| Metadata completeness metadata-completeness | Pass | 2 of 2 | All metadata signals present: canonical URL, lang="en-US", og:image, og:type |
| Agent instruction / when-to-use agent-instruction | Pass | 3 of 3 | no detail published |
Found and recommended
Whether an assistant can find the company by name, confirm what it is, and see it in the registries agents read. 2 checks in this group do not apply to this site and are left out.
| Check | Result | Points | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand name discoverability brand-search-accuracy | Partial | 1 of 3 | slack.com ranks #8 for "Slack" (searched your brand name alone: no main product term from your homepage qualified) |
| Wikipedia / Wikidata entity presence wikipedia-presence | Pass | 4 of 4 | Wikipedia "Slack (software)" and Wikidata Q17130715 both verified - domain confirmed on both sources |
| Developer resource discoverability agentic-search-specific | Pass | 3 of 3 | no detail published |
| NPM/PyPI SDK package npm-sdk-package | Pass | 1 of 1 | no detail published |
| ChatGPT app listed chatgpt-app-listed | Pass | 2 of 2 | no detail published |
| Listed on skills.sh skills-sh-listed | Fail | 0 of 1 | No official skills self-published on skills.sh (100 community skills with potential relation to this domain found, but only self-published official skills count) |
| ARD discovery ard-catalog | Fail | 0 of 1 | No /.well-known/ard.json, no same-site rel="ard" link, and no legacy /.well-known/ai-catalog.json |
Payments
The agent payment protocols Ora probes for. A site that sells nothing has nothing here, and Ora scores the layer out of zero when none applies. None of the 6 payment checks applied to slack.com.
The fixes worth most points
Ora attaches an estimate to each failing or partial check: how many points the site would gain by passing it. These are the 5 with the largest estimates for Slack, with what Ora observed. The wording of each fix is Ora's; the 28 checks it runs on an MCP server are listed with their layer and tier.
- OpenAPI spec published: fail, 0 of 7, about 4 points to gain. Ora saw: No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found
- MCP server / manifest: fail, 0 of 6, about 3.6 points to gain. Ora saw: No MCP server or manifest found
- Scoped permissions: fail, 0 of 5, about 3 points to gain. Ora saw: No declared OAuth scopes, security schemes, or scoped-permission documentation found
- WebMCP support: fail, 0 of 5, about 3 points to gain. Ora saw: No WebMCP support detected - no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found
- Brand name discoverability: partial, 1 of 3, about 2.6 points to gain. Ora saw: slack.com ranks #8 for "Slack" (searched your brand name alone: no main product term from your homepage qualified)
Our read
Slack is the first company in this directory's first dozen with no MCP server and no manifest at all: Ora found no endpoint, no server card and no first-party package, which costs 6 points on its own. The rest of the act layer is sparse for a platform whose API is used by every workplace bot: OpenID Connect discovery is published on slack.com and an SDK is on npm, but Ora found neither an OpenAPI specification nor a CLI, neither declared scopes nor a standard API path on the home page, only links to api.slack.com. The reading side is middling, with an llms.txt at the root and an open door, but no JSON-LD on the home page and a text ratio just under the 5 percent target. The brand search places slack.com eighth for its own name. The gap between how many agents post into Slack and what Slack publishes for agents to find is the widest in this batch.
Test your own surfaces
The scan above is free and needs no account: enter a domain at ora.ai and read the same four layers for your own site. For an MCP server, Ora scans the server URL itself and runs 28 of its 132 public checks on it, which is why it is the check this directory recommends; the reasons, the limits and the alternatives are on their own page. The command below runs the same audit from a terminal and exits with 1 under the score you set, so it can gate a deploy.
npx ax@0.10 audit https://example.com --min-score 70All 360 checks, one company a day. Corrections to the corrections page.