Scovant Core

Scovant Core

Definition

Scovant Core is an open-source, evidence-first scanner for passive AI-agent readiness signals on websites.

Scovant Core measures what a site declares. Scovant Cloud measures what real agents actually experience.

Core does NOT execute real agents.

It reads what the site already exposes on request: robots/crawler policy, structured data, llms.txt, machine-readable discovery, MCP metadata, WebMCP declaration, commerce metadata, HTTP semantics, and its own usage in CI.

A high Technical Readiness rating does not prove that autonomous agents can complete real workflows on the site.

30-second install

uvx --from scovant-core scovant scan https://example.com   # no install, needs uv

pipx run --spec scovant-core scovant scan https://example.com pip install scovant-core # Python >= 3.12 pip install "scovant-core[tokens]" # + bundled tokenizer for PAGE_TOKEN_BLOAT npx @scovant/core scan https://example.com # Node launcher, needs uv/pipx/python3

Reproducible install

Same Core version does not guarantee the same dependency graph months later. Each release ships exact pins:

pip install "scovant-core==0.26.0" -c https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Scovant/scovant-core/v0.26.0/constraints/constraints-0.26.0.txt

Every report records what actually ran (provenance.dependencies, provenance.environment_digest).

Example output

Running scovant scan https://example.com against a well-instrumented commerce site produces text output shaped like this (real output, rendered — never from a live scan — from the commerce-good test fixture; the established readiness checks have nothing to report, so "Top findings" carries only the site's three [security]-tagged findings — the SECURITY checks are never rated, but a FAIL/WARN among them still surfaces in "Top findings", tagged [security], appended after any readiness FAIL/WARN). "Diagnostics" tallies the readiness checks' own verdicts; they are diagnostics and carry no weight in Technical Readiness. The "Experimental (not scored)" block lists every experimental check that evaluated to something other than N/A on this scan (including a WARN, as below — experimental findings are still shown, just never scored), plus a compact "N/A: ..." line naming the experimental checks that had nothing to evaluate — so every check the header counts is named somewhere, never merely counted. No check affects Technical Readiness; pass --experimental to also run the experimental checks gated behind that flag (omit it and they're skipped entirely, not evaluated as N/A) and rank experimental findings with the rest — the scan's scope is then CUSTOM. The "Agentic Security & Trust" block below it is the 18 SECURITY checks' own summary — see docs/security.md for the full boundary of what it does and does not test.

SCOVANT CORE

──────────────────────────────────────────────

Target: https://example.com/ Profile: commerce (auto → commerce, confidence 0.85) Core version: 0.26.0

Technical Readiness 82 / 100 B · coverage 97% · model R2.1@7b46d2ed7f8b Not measured by Core: MCP_DISCOVERY_INVALID (handshake_not_performed) Diagnostics (51 readiness checks): 40 pass · 1 warn · 0 fail

Capabilities detected (descriptive, not scored) mcp: present webmcp: absent ucp: present llms_txt: present openapi: not_checked oauth: not_checked content_signal: present security_txt: present

AgentReady v1.0 (descriptive, not scored): MUST 3/3 measured — 3 pass · SHOULD 5/12 measured — 5 pass · MAY none measured (0/3) Mapping: docs/standards/agentready.md

69 checks 51 PASS 3 WARN 1 FAIL 14 N/A 0 ERROR

Top findings

FAIL [security] CORE-SECURITY-003 Neither Content-Security-Policy nor X-Frame-Options is sent.

WARN [security] CORE-SECURITY-002 No Strict-Transport-Security header.

WARN [security] CORE-SECURITY-005 Missing: referrer-policy, x-content-type-options.

Experimental (not scored) ────────────────────────────────────────────── PASS CORE-ACCESS-011 llms.txt links useful same-origin pages and carries no misplaced policy or template text.

PASS CORE-INTERFACE-008 A UCP profile is published and valid.

PASS CORE-MACHINE-012 The structured price matches a visible price on the page.

WARN CORE-OPERABILITY-011 3 of 3 machine surface(s) are not linked from anything an agent reads: llms_txt, mcp, ucp.

PASS [security] CORE-SECURITY-009 No administrative/destructive interfaces advertised.

PASS [security] CORE-SECURITY-011 No indicators found.

PASS [security] CORE-SECURITY-012 No indicators found.

PASS [security] CORE-SECURITY-013 No indicators found.

PASS [security] CORE-SECURITY-014 No indicators found.

PASS [security] CORE-SECURITY-015 No indicators found.

PASS [security] CORE-SECURITY-016 No indicators found.

N/A: CORE-INTERFACE-004, CORE-INTERFACE-009, CORE-MACHINE-013, CORE-OPERABILITY-007, CORE-SECURITY-010, CORE-SECURITY-017, CORE-SECURITY-018

AGENTIC SECURITY & TRUST PASSIVE SIGNALS ONLY ────────────────────────────────────────────── Critical 0 High 0 Medium 1 Low 2 auth PASS 0 WARN 0 FAIL 0 Data exposure PASS 3 WARN 0 FAIL 0 Disclosure PASS 1 WARN 0 FAIL 0 Prompt surface PASS 6 WARN 0 FAIL 0 Web baseline PASS 1 WARN 2 FAIL 1 Observed authorization NOT TESTED Verified agent identity NOT TESTED Prompt-injection resilience NOT TESTED Tool invocation safety NOT TESTED This section evaluates tested AI-agent security controls and machine-facing security signals. It is not an overall website or application security rating.

Not tested by Scovant Core ────────────────────────────────────────────── Observed WAF access NOT TESTED Real agent tasks NOT TESTED MCP tool execution NOT TESTED WebMCP state parity NOT TESTED Multi-model reliability NOT TESTED Regression stability NOT TESTED

Verify with real agents: https://scovant.com/scan?utm_source=scovant-core&utm_medium=cli&utm_campaign=oss

The headline is Technical Readiness (readiness.technical — the open R2 model, see docs/r2.md): --min-score and --require-canonical gate on it, and a scan whose Technical Readiness has no number fails --min-score. It is Core's only rating: the five-domain Static Signal Score that 0.18.0 deprecated was removed in 0.19.0 (see the CHANGELOG for the migration notes).

What Core checks

69 checks in total: 51 readiness checks across 5 categories (8 experimental) and 18 passive security checks (CORE-SECURITY-001..018, 10 experimental). Every check is a diagnostic: none of them carries weight in Technical Readiness, which is computed from the readiness rules. Core implements 57 of the 66 rules; its CLI gathers evidence for 48 today (9 of them only when the site publishes no MCP file). Experimental checks run and report in their own block (see below).

The readiness checks:

• Access & Discovery (11) — HTTPS reachability, robots.txt, AI crawler policy, training-vs-search crawler separation, sitemap availability and freshness, canonical URLs, indexability, llms.txt, Content-Signal, and (experimental) llms.txt utility (useful links, no misplaced policy text, not a template)
• Machine Understanding (12) — JSON-LD parseability, Organization and WebSite/WebPage entities, Product/Offer structured data, product identifier count, breadcrumbs, metadata quality, heading structure, language declaration, image alt coverage, and (experimental) visible-vs- structured price consistency
• Agent Interfaces (9) — MCP discovery and server-declaration quality, WebMCP static presence and (experimental) tool-declaration quality, OpenAPI discovery, OAuth authorization-server and protected-resource metadata, and (experimental) UCP profile validity and agent discovery surface presence (A2A cards, AI-plugin manifests, agents.json, Agent Skills)
• Trust & Commerce (7) — contact/support, shipping, returns/refund, privacy, terms, security.txt, and pricing discoverability
• Operability & Efficiency (11) — server-rendered core content, redirect-chain complexity, cache validators, broken machine-consumable endpoints, agent parse cost, form/control labels, unknown paths return a real 404, rate-limiting (429) is signalled with Retry-After, bot- challenge pages are not served as HTTP 200, and (experimental, --experimental only) machine-reference integrity and discovery linkage

Experimental checks

Seven checks ship experimental: they evaluate and appear in every report, in their own block, until they have been calibrated against real-world traffic and promoted. Like every check, they never affect Technical Readiness.

CORE-OPERABILITY-007 is additionally gated on the --experimental flag itself — it is the only check whose gatherer (reference_integrity) makes any network request at all beyond the ordinary scan, so a plain scovant scan never resolves an external package registry or DNS name for it. The other six evaluate on every scan, reported in their own block.

See docs/checks.md for the full catalog — every check's id, applicable profile, and why it matters — generated straight from the check registry so it can never drift from what the package actually runs.

Agentic Security & Trust (passive)

The passive security checks counted above report passive, declared/observed security signals — HTTP security headers, HSTS, CSP, cookie flags, security.txt validity, credential-like values or internal-network references exposed in machine-facing surfaces, privileged endpoints advertised to agents, and prompt-injection-shaped content in llms.txt/MCP tool descriptions. They are never rated and never change Technical Readiness — every scan reports the same PASSIVE SIGNALS ONLY banner and the same four NOT TESTED lines (observed authorization, verified agent identity, prompt-injection resilience, tool invocation safety). Full boundary, verification-mode semantics, and standards mapping: docs/security.md.

What Core does NOT test

Core is a static, unauthenticated scanner. It never opens a browser and never observes real traffic, so it cannot tell you:

• Observed WAF/bot-firewall access
• Real agent task completion
• MCP tool execution
• WebMCP state parity (runtime, not just static presence)
• Multi-model reliability
• Regression stability over time

Standards

Scovant Core maps its checks to AgentReady v1.0 (https://agentready.org/, MIT), the open baseline standard for agent-facing website signals. AgentReady defines requirements, not weights; Core reports which requirements its checks measure (metrics.standards.agentready_v1 in every report) and never reproduces any third-party score. Mapping: docs/standards/agentready.md.

Core vs Cloud

Scovant Core measures passive, machine-facing signals. Scovant Cloud verifies how real agents actually behave, across providers, browser runtimes, security layers and time.

See docs/core-vs-cloud.md for the full capability matrix and co