# Caravanserai

> The connection between stores that want to be bought from by AI, and the AI
> agents doing the buying. A store tells every agent what is true right now —
> live price, live stock, a delivery window to a specific address — and stands
> behind it with a signed, time-boxed quote. A buyer connects the assistant they
> already use, and a card, and that assistant orders on their behalf.

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.

## The two sides

**Stores** integrate once, against the till they already run, and answer every
agent that arrives. Today we read Square, Clover and WooCommerce, and we serve
MCP and our own API; Toast, Lightspeed and the other rails are not built yet,
and integrating once is what earns each of them as it lands. The charge runs on the
store's own processor under the store's own account: we hold no card data, take
no fee on the transaction, and are never the merchant of record.

**Buyers** hold an account with a card on file, a rule for where an assistant of
theirs may spend and how much, and a revocable credential they issue to their
own ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. An assistant can buy nowhere until the buyer names
somewhere; every cap is re-checked at the moment money moves, not at the moment
the quote was issued.

What that does NOT include today, stated because an agent reading this should
not infer it: we do not have an assistant of our own, and none of this reaches
Amazon, DoorDash or Instacart. Those are where the product goes, by partnership,
once there is volume to bring — not something it does now.

## 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.app/index-v1/): 1,165 US independent shops probed, 946 analysable (81.2%). Fieldwork 31 August – 1 September 2026.
- [Pre-registration](https://caravanserai.app/index-v1/preregistration/): hypotheses, measures, analysis plan and falsification conditions, dated 31 August 2026, before the run.
- [Findings as JSON](https://caravanserai.app/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.app/): the argument, the failure modes of the first attempt, and what a signed quote is.
- [Protocol](https://caravanserai.app/protocol/): the interface a store speaks inward once, the four properties of a quote, and the open questions.
- [Receipts](https://caravanserai.app/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.app/index-v1/

## Contact

hello@caravanserai.app