IBM: 27 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan
In short
IBM scores 27 of 100 on Ora's agent-readiness scan, grade F, read on 9 November 2026. 9 percent of the 132,085 domains Ora ranks score under 20, and the average score is 44. Four agents blocked at the door of a company that sells agent platforms.
The score
IBM is a technology and consulting company based in Armonk, New York.
- 27of 100, grade FOra's agent-readiness scan of ibm.com, read 9 November 2026, listed under Infrastructure.
- 9Discovery, of 12Whether assistants find the company: search presence, Wikipedia and Wikidata, catalogues.
- 0Access, of 50Whether they can read it: the door, text without JavaScript, llms.txt, structured data.
- 14Usability, of 60Whether they can act through it: an MCP server, an API with a specification, sign-in for agents.
- 0Payments, of 0No check in this layer applied to the site.
9 percent of the 132,085 domains Ora ranks score under 20, and the average score is 44.
Ora's one-line summary: IBM offers public API endpoints with JSON responses, but lacks published OpenAPI specification.
What an assistant meets at the door
Before an assistant can read, compare or buy, it has to get in. These rows are the door: whether the bot shield lets the main agents through, what robots.txt tells the search, training and user-triggered agents, and whether the home page has text without running JavaScript.
| Check | Result | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|
| Not blocked by bot detection | Fail, 0 of 2 | Agents blocked: ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot |
| Agent crawler reachability | Fail, 0 of 2 | No agent we tested can reach the homepage - ChatGPT-User: blocked, OAI-SearchBot: blocked, Claude-User: blocked, PerplexityBot: blocked |
| robots.txt AI crawler policy | Did not apply, 0 of 2 | Cannot verify robots.txt permission for search crawlers: HTTP 403 |
| robots.txt agent-user policy | Did not apply, 0 of 2 | Cannot verify robots.txt permission for user-triggered agents: HTTP 403 |
| Content without JavaScript | error, 0 of 3 | Could not fetch homepage |
| Homepage not hidden from search | Did not apply, 0 of 1 | Homepage not read - cannot tell whether it is hidden from search |
What it can read, and what it can do
The reading layer is what an assistant takes away from the pages: a text file written for it, markdown on request, structured data about the company, a sitemap. The act layer is whether it can do anything through a published interface rather than by clicking through the site.
| Check | Result | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|
| llms.txt exists | Fail, 0 of 1 | No llms.txt found at /llms.txt or /.well-known/llms.txt. |
| llms.txt formatting | Fail, 0 of 2 | No llms.txt found to evaluate quality |
| Markdown agent docs | 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). |
| Bot-UA markdown serving | 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. |
| JSON-LD structured data | error, 0 of 4 | Could not fetch homepage |
| Organization schema completeness | error, 0 of 2 | Could not fetch homepage |
| Sitemap exists | Fail, 0 of 2 | No sitemap found |
| Metadata completeness | error, 0 of 2 | Could not fetch homepage |
| Page token budget | Did not apply, 0 of 1 | Nothing sampled to measure |
| Check | Result | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|
| MCP server / manifest | Fail, 0 of 6 | No MCP server or manifest found |
| MCP well-known discovery | Fail, 0 of 2 | No MCP server URL discovered |
| Public API with reachable endpoints | Pass, 7 of 7 | GraphQL endpoint at https://ibm.com/graphql is reachable; introspection requires authentication (API key / OAuth), which is expected for agent access. Best-of-protocols score: 7/7. |
| Public API/docs linked from homepage | Fail, 0 of 3 | No public API or documentation page linked from homepage |
| OpenAPI spec published | Fail, 0 of 7 | No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found |
| Developer portal | Fail, 0 of 6 | No developer portal found |
| OAuth 2.0 support | Fail, 0 of 5 | No OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect support detected |
| Scoped permissions | Fail, 0 of 5 | No declared OAuth scopes, security schemes, or scoped-permission documentation found |
| Multi-language SDK packages | Partial, 2 of 3 | SDK packages found in npm, rubygems |
| CLI tool available | Fail, 0 of 3 | No CLI tool found |
| WebMCP support | Fail, 0 of 5 | No WebMCP support detected - no document.modelContext / navigator.modelContext usage found |
| Check | Result | What Ora saw |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia / Wikidata entity presence | Pass, 4 of 4 | Wikipedia "IBM Z" and Wikidata Q37156 both verified - domain confirmed on both sources |
| Brand name discoverability | Partial, 1 of 3 | ibm.com ranks #8 for "ibm" (searched your brand name alone: we could not read a product term from your site) |
| Category share of voice | Did not apply, 0 of 6 | Category share of voice is in beta. It measures whether agents surface you for capability and use-case searches (not just your name). |
| Developer resource discoverability | Pass, 3 of 3 | Agent discovered 1 developer-resource type by name (API docs) across 3 pages |
The six payment checks did not apply on this read: Ora did not read the site as a shop.
Three fixes to hand to the web team
Ora estimates how many points each open check would return. These are the largest on this read, in Ora's words where it gave them, so a leader can hand the list over without translating it.
- OpenAPI spec published, worth about 4.7 points by Ora's estimate: No OpenAPI/Swagger specification found.
- MCP server / manifest, worth about 4.4 points by Ora's estimate: No MCP server or manifest found.
- Developer portal, worth about 4 points by Ora's estimate: No developer portal found.
Our read
IBM blocks all four agents at its own front door. ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User and PerplexityBot were blocked, robots.txt answered 403 and the home page could not be fetched, so the content, policy, structured-data and metadata rows are unverified rather than failed, and the Access layer reads 0 of 50; there is no sitemap and no llms.txt. What Ora could reach on the act layer is a GraphQL endpoint at ibm.com/graphql with introspection gated, and SDK packages on npm and RubyGems, with no developer portal found from the home page, no OpenAPI specification, and neither an MCP server nor OAuth discovery, so the Usability layer reads 14 of 60. The Discovery layer is 9 of 12: Wikipedia and Wikidata confirm the company, though the article matched is the one for IBM Z, and ibm.com ranks eighth for ibm, a search run on the bare name. The company that sells agent platforms to enterprises has a corporate site that turns agents away; the block is the whole story of this F.
Test your own site
Run the same scan on your own domain at ora.ai. The score, the layers and the fixes on this page come from its public result for ibm.com; a scan of a public site takes a few minutes and needs no account.
- Scan your domain on OraThe same checks, the same scoring, on your own site.
- The self-check, 18 questionsWhat to ask for, in business terms, before the scan.
- All the 360 checksThe other companies in this series, newest first.
Sources
- Ora report for ibm.com (ora.ai/score/ibm.com), read 9 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
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