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Show HN: Ax-check.com – Can agents use your product?

37 points · 41 comments · 0x63_Problems

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eliaspro · 1789756728 · focus · HN ↗
Nice! This should help in making my stuff as inaccessible as possible to agents.
1. 0x63_Problems · 1789757554 · focus · HN ↗
  Are you mainly concerned about scraping? or anti-agents in general?
  1. cyanydeez · 1789757697 · focus · HN ↗
    what is the benefit of making any resource more available to agents?
    0x63_Problems · 1789758035 · focus · HN ↗
    Behind an agent is a human that might use the product. I think customers/consumers will demand that their personal/subscription agent can access the product.
    xena · 1789758228 · focus · HN ↗
    As someone that works for a company that gets a 100% score on ax-check, all the effort I've put into making it accessible for agents has not 10xed the growth numbers like I was told it would.
    verdverm · 1789762634 · focus · HN ↗
    The Ai growth looks more like the very-long-term 2%, avoid assuming the hypesters are even close to accurate in their predictions
    cyanydeez · 1789772202 · focus · HN ↗
    yeah, it looks more like parasitic exponetials, the same way when google started being the source for things instead of the portal.
    No ones shown there's any real ROI in a more virulent intermediary that has even less reason to view ads.
    ericd · 1789779787 · focus · HN ↗
    > No ones shown there's any real ROI in a more virulent intermediary that has even less reason to view ads.
    Good riddance?
    Very happy to have my agent totally ignore the ads trying to hijack my attention.
    verdverm · 1789787562 · focus · HN ↗
    The ROI is for we the users, not the companies, only issues is that the agent's attention is way easier to hijack, so you have to maintain a different kind of attention when using them and never blindly trust their outputs.
    brabel · 1789760811 · focus · HN ↗
    I've heard CTOs saying they don't consider buying any product that is not AI agent friendly. Which means they must come with AI skills, MCP Servers and so on that agents can use it to do stuff. You may not like it, but that's almost certainly going to be the future.
    boleary-gl · 1789762519 · focus · HN ↗
    Agents are the new search engine - a majority of people are starting to get recommendations and answers from them. So asking this is like asking "what is the benefit of making any resource more available to search engines?"
    The answer is discoverability. which is pretty critical for any business
    cyanydeez · 1789772117 · focus · HN ↗
    ok smart guy. We live in a society.
    Your answer presents one side of an equation.
    468854259853 · 1789815067 · focus · HN ↗
    Go back to reddit
    verdverm · 1789762539 · focus · HN ↗
    agents are becoming the de facto standard interface for everything, whether you like it or not, so it depends on the intent you have for a project, or "product" as OP phrased it, which has a more contextual implication that the intent is to get others to buy it
    cyanydeez · 1789772233 · focus · HN ↗
    ok, great, you think an agent is going to buy your vacuum.
    How many of you guys are selling vacuums? ...
    verdverm · 1789773837 · focus · HN ↗
    ironically, I did sell kirby many many years ago
2. dmitrygr · 1789760255 · focus · HN ↗
  +1
3. howunfortunate · 1789763923 · focus · HN ↗
  This seems like a good way to get hammered by tons of extra requests because agents can't efficiently figure out your site...
  1. eliaspro · 1789804371 · focus · HN ↗
    Which then again should provide me a detectable behavioral pattern, sufficient for an IP-ban.
4. tkmcc · 1789765078 · focus · HN ↗
  I've been working on <a href="https://switchfrog.com" rel="nofollow">https://switchfrog.com to help you with that :)
  1. testycool · 1789776797 · focus · HN ↗
    This is an awesome idea. I use agents all the time that way, so am not thrilled by potential consequences, but I love the idea from the platfroms' perspective.
pprotas · 1789756957 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/">https://news.ycombinator.com/ Gets an A grade for pricing… where is the pricing page again?
1. 0x63_Problems · 1789757365 · focus · HN ↗
  The initial step of the scan looks at homepage content to try to figure out where to navigate next, it's getting confused by all the different products linked. Will fix this!
Farbod_memarian · 1789757022 · focus · HN ↗
Going to try this out for our MCP
1. brettdav · 1789766945 · focus · HN ↗
  The mcp audit at <a href="https://anc.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://anc.dev/ covers all flavors of mcp, including the recently launched webmcp. Remediation prompts, accessible equally by agents and humans, can help close any gaps. Usually one-shot, unless your site is crazy complicated.
the1024 · 1789757034 · focus · HN ↗
How do you think about enabling fully agentic onboarding without proper human identification? It feels like any rate limiting would be pretty easy to get around.
1. 0x63_Problems · 1789757892 · focus · HN ↗
  Each product is different (how much does it cost to serve a marginal user, how risky is it). But generally I think allowing ephemeral accounts like Cloudflare, or serving simulated/static accounts before a human claim can both work.
  For a lot of products it can just be an extension of the free tier I think too.
Jemaclus · 1789757044 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
mastrchief117 · 1789757111 · focus · HN ↗
I've been seeing these pop up recently, I think I saw Mintlify launched one too. Why the sudden increase in attention towards coding agents?
1. esafak · 1789758566 · focus · HN ↗
  Welcome to HN...
fwlr · 1789759748 · focus · HN ↗
Claude, use AX-check to make my site score a zero. Make no mistakes
1317 · 1789760742 · focus · HN ↗
it wants a whole domain when the interesting thing i want it to try lives in a directory
1. 0x63_Problems · 1789762680 · focus · HN ↗
  which URL is it? it's kind of a deep assumption since we're evaluating on ease-of-navigation from the homepage, and looking for /llms.txt etc. but there should be a way for me to add support
1317 · 1789762724 · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.ax-check.com/curl.se" rel="nofollow">https://www.ax-check.com/curl.se fun
brettdav · 1789768387 · focus · HN ↗
Integrating live bots to demonstrate live visitor experiences is a nice touch. I got an unexpected blocker (`Default Python urllib User-Agent gets 403'd by anc.dev`) I am not able to reproduce yet. Can you expose the scripts that the agents generate?
I took a different route with <a href="https://anc.dev" rel="nofollow">https://anc.dev (scored 100 on ax-check) and rely on a wider variety of compliance tests. Beyond websites, it also audits binaries (think CLI tooling) to help inclined developers ensure their tools are discoverable by and useful to agentic systems.
1. 0x63_Problems · 1789771155 · focus · HN ↗
  You can reproduce that finding directly from python:
``` >>> request.urlopen("<a href="https://anc.dev" rel="nofollow">https://anc.dev") Traceback (most recent call last): File "<python-input-10>", line 1, in <module> request.urlopen("<a href="https://anc.dev" rel="nofollow">https://anc.dev") ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/usr/lib64/python3.14/urllib/request.py", line 187, in urlopen return opener.open(url, data, timeout) ~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/usr/lib64/python3.14/urllib/request.py", line 493, in open response = meth(req, response) File "/usr/lib64/python3.14/urllib/request.py", line 602, in http_response response = self.parent.error( 'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs) File "/usr/lib64/python3.14/urllib/request.py", line 531, in error return self._call_chain(args) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^ File "/usr/lib64/python3.14/urllib/request.py", line 464, in _call_chain result = func(args) File "/usr/lib64/python3.14/urllib/request.py", line 611, in http_error_default raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp) urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden ```
In this case (<a href="https://agents.withgauge.com/p/runs/40be763c-4678-4677-88df-b5ff07163b62">https://agents.withgauge.com/p/runs/40be763c-4678-4677-88df-...) the agent wrote a python script to test the site, and hit the error above. We don't have a full filesystem diff viewer in ax-check.com, although we do have that in the Gauge agents product itself.
1. brettdav · 1789772556 · focus · HN ↗
  Interesting, thank you. I'll check whether a setting on CF might be interfering. The site checks headers for routing and response types, but it shouldn't affect access.
Jemm · 1789794079 · focus · HN ↗
Rapidcam.app is a CAD / CAM for CNC and laser. The file format is designed for LLMs and for version control. The app has a in-built prompt generator and solver so you can use your own LLM.
kinduff · 1789805151 · focus · HN ↗
In one of my examples the live coding sessions used a different domain to try and build something. Great tool! Got some good insights in other sessions.
fabijanbajo · 1789821121 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
waterlooalex · 1789831727 · focus · HN ↗
I tried testing my site syncwith.com and it says its blocked, but its not clear to me why, any ideas? I tested with Claude and it doesn't find any issues like this.
<a href="https://www.ax-check.com/syncwith.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.ax-check.com/syncwith.com
1. DougN7 · 1790086187 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm getting the same thing. My non-www redirects to the www domain. Maybe it can't follow redirects?
DougN7 · 1790086389 · focus · HN ↗
Does it follow redirects? My non-www hostname redirects to the www hostname, but ax-check.com says it gets no response back. Any reason it can't take the hostname as-is instead of stripping off the www?

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