4 ms·

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

4 points by 0x63_Problems 17d ago

This is a free site that checks whether agents can smoothly navigate a site and try out the product. Agents can use this too, just point them to ax-check.com

eliaspro 16d ago
Nice! This should help in making my stuff as inaccessible as possible to agents.
- 0x63_Problems 16d ago
  Are you mainly concerned about scraping? or anti-agents in general?
  - cyanydeez 16d ago
    what is the benefit of making any resource more available to agents?
    - 0x63_Problems 16d ago
      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 16d ago
        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 16d ago
        The Ai growth looks more like the very-long-term 2% (technically productivity growth from innovation), avoid assuming the hypesters are even close to accurate in their predictions
        cyanydeez 16d ago
        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 16d ago
        > 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 16d ago
        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 16d ago
      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 16d ago
      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 16d ago
        ok smart guy. We live in a society. Your answer presents one side of an equation.
        468854259853 16d ago
        Go back to reddit
    - verdverm 16d ago
      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 16d ago
        ok, great, you think an agent is going to buy your vacuum. How many of you guys are selling vacuums? ...
        verdverm 16d ago
        ironically, I did sell a kirby many many years ago the idea is likely way more about business purchases and SaaS than consumer products, though I did have an agent do deep research to give me options when deciding on a new mattress
- dmitrygr 16d ago
  +1
- howunfortunate 16d ago
  This seems like a good way to get hammered by tons of extra requests because agents can't efficiently figure out your site...
  - eliaspro 16d ago
    Which then again should provide me a detectable behavioral pattern, sufficient for an IP-ban.
- tkmcc 16d ago
  I've been working on https://switchfrog.com https://switchfrog.com to help you with that :)
  - testycool 16d ago
    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 16d ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ Gets an A grade for pricing… where is the pricing page again?
- 0x63_Problems 16d ago
  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 16d ago
Going to try this out for our MCP
- brettdav 16d ago
  The mcp audit at https://anc.dev/ 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 16d ago
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.
- 0x63_Problems 16d ago
  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 16d ago
[dead]
mastrchief117 16d ago
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?
- esafak 16d ago
  Welcome to HN...
fwlr 16d ago
Claude, use AX-check to make my site score a zero. Make no mistakes
1317 16d ago
it wants a whole domain when the interesting thing i want it to try lives in a directory
- 0x63_Problems 16d ago
  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 16d ago
https://www.ax-check.com/curl.se https://www.ax-check.com/curl.se fun
brettdav 16d ago
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 https://anc.dev 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.
- 0x63_Problems 16d ago
  You can reproduce that finding directly from python: ``` >>> request.urlopen("https://anc.dev https://anc.dev") [...traceback info...] urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden ``` In this case (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.
  - brettdav 16d ago
    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 16d ago
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 16d ago
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 16d ago
[dead]
waterlooalex 15d ago
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. https://www.ax-check.com/syncwith.com https://www.ax-check.com/syncwith.com

4 points by 0x63_Problems 17d ago

This is a free site that checks whether agents can smoothly navigate a site and try out the product. Agents can use this too, just point them to ax-check.com

eliaspro 16d ago

Nice! This should help in making my stuff as inaccessible as possible to agents.

0x63_Problems 16d ago
Are you mainly concerned about scraping? or anti-agents in general?
- cyanydeez 16d ago
  what is the benefit of making any resource more available to agents?
  - 0x63_Problems 16d ago
    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 16d ago
      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 16d ago
        The Ai growth looks more like the very-long-term 2% (technically productivity growth from innovation), avoid assuming the hypesters are even close to accurate in their predictions
        cyanydeez 16d ago
        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 16d ago
        > 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 16d ago
        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 16d ago
    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 16d ago
    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 16d ago
      ok smart guy. We live in a society. Your answer presents one side of an equation.
      - 468854259853 16d ago
        Go back to reddit
  - verdverm 16d ago
    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 16d ago
      ok, great, you think an agent is going to buy your vacuum. How many of you guys are selling vacuums? ...
      - verdverm 16d ago
        ironically, I did sell a kirby many many years ago the idea is likely way more about business purchases and SaaS than consumer products, though I did have an agent do deep research to give me options when deciding on a new mattress
dmitrygr 16d ago
+1
howunfortunate 16d ago
This seems like a good way to get hammered by tons of extra requests because agents can't efficiently figure out your site...
- eliaspro 16d ago
  Which then again should provide me a detectable behavioral pattern, sufficient for an IP-ban.
tkmcc 16d ago
I've been working on https://switchfrog.com https://switchfrog.com to help you with that :)
- testycool 16d ago
  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 16d ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ Gets an A grade for pricing… where is the pricing page again?

0x63_Problems 16d ago
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 16d ago

Going to try this out for our MCP

brettdav 16d ago
The mcp audit at https://anc.dev/ 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 16d ago

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.

0x63_Problems 16d ago
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 16d ago

[dead]

mastrchief117 16d ago

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?

esafak 16d ago
Welcome to HN...

fwlr 16d ago

Claude, use AX-check to make my site score a zero. Make no mistakes

1317 16d ago

it wants a whole domain when the interesting thing i want it to try lives in a directory

0x63_Problems 16d ago
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 16d ago

https://www.ax-check.com/curl.se https://www.ax-check.com/curl.se fun

brettdav 16d ago

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 https://anc.dev 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.

0x63_Problems 16d ago
You can reproduce that finding directly from python: ``` >>> request.urlopen("https://anc.dev https://anc.dev") [...traceback info...] urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden ``` In this case (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.
- brettdav 16d ago
  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 16d ago

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 16d ago

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 16d ago

[dead]

waterlooalex 15d ago

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. https://www.ax-check.com/syncwith.com https://www.ax-check.com/syncwith.com