# Caravanserai

> One integration that lets a store tell every AI agent what is true right now —
> live price, live stock, a delivery window to a specific address — and stand
> behind it with a signed, time-boxed quote.

Everyone built the checkout. Nobody built the shelf. Payment was never the
broken part: the first attempt at agentic commerce failed on merchant-side data,
and every named reason was something a store had never told anyone.

## Primary research

We publish The Agent Readability Index, a standing measurement of what an AI
agent can actually read when it fetches an independent local shop.

- [The Agent Readability Index v1](https://caravanserai.co/index-v1/): 1,165 US independent shops probed, 946 analysable (81.2%). Fieldwork 31 August – 1 September 2026.
- [Pre-registration](https://caravanserai.co/index-v1/preregistration/): hypotheses, measures, analysis plan and falsification conditions, dated 31 August 2026, before the run.
- [Findings as JSON](https://caravanserai.co/index-v1/findings.json): aggregate results, CC BY 4.0.

Headline findings, v1:

- 0% of 946 readable shops publish a delivery promise a machine can act on. 95% CI upper bound 0.4%. 48.5% say they deliver in prose an agent cannot book against.
- 92.7% of Shopify shops publish a machine-readable catalogue, against a next-best platform figure of 0.3%. The market is split by platform default, not by merchant decision.
- Almost nobody blocks agents. 40 of 1,030 shops whose robots.txt resolved (3.9%) disallow even one of the five named agents; by agent, ClaudeBot 3.9%, GPTBot 3.7%, Google-Extended 3.7%, PerplexityBot 1.4%, OAI-SearchBot 1.4%. These shops are not refusing agents; they are invisible by default.

Scope: the Index measures what a shop publishes on its own website. Square's
ChatGPT app and Claude plugin, live since 1 July 2026 for US food-and-beverage
sellers with an active Square Online Ordering profile, route orders into Square
Online Ordering and the point of sale without passing through the shop's
website. That channel is outside this measurement; the Square figures here are
website figures.

## The site

- [Front page](https://caravanserai.co/): the argument, the failure modes of the first attempt, and what a signed quote is.
- [Protocol](https://caravanserai.co/protocol/): the interface a store speaks inward once, the four properties of a quote, and the open questions.
- [Receipts](https://caravanserai.co/receipts/): every figure on the site with the document behind it and the date it was true.

## Attribution

Marks shown on this site identify the source of a figure or the publisher of a
protocol. They are citations, not relationships. Cite the Index as:

  Caravanserai. "The Agent Readability Index, v1." Fieldwork 31 August – 1 September 2026.
  https://caravanserai.co/index-v1/

## Contact

hello@caravanserai.co