Can a machine find the APIs my company publishes?
If you publish APIs, an API catalog is the one address on your domain that lists them, with links to each one's documentation and machine-readable description. It is an IETF standard, RFC 9727. We check whether your domain serves one and whether it actually lists anything.
What it actually is
It is the contents page for your APIs. Rather than an agent hunting through a developer portal for the right reference, it reads one standard file and finds each API with its docs, its specification and its status. The format is a linkset, a plain list of typed links that any software can parse.
Why it matters
APIs that cannot be found get integrated slowly, by hand, or not at all. An agent asked to connect two services starts by working out what each one offers, and a catalog answers that in one request. For a company whose product is its API, being discoverable by machines is part of being discoverable at all.
What good looks like
A catalog at the standard address that lists every public API you support, each entry linking to documentation and a machine-readable description that still resolve, with retired APIs taken out rather than left in.
Being honest about it
This is an Advanced check: it never fails a page and stays out of your headline score. Unlike most of its neighbours it is a ratified standard rather than a draft, but it is only relevant if you publish APIs, and most websites do not. We count an empty catalog as absent, because a valid file listing nothing gives an agent nothing to use.
Where most sites go wrong
The most common failure we see is the empty catalog: correct address, correct format, no entries, usually switched on by a platform before anyone filled it in. The other is a catalog that points to documentation pages that moved in the last redesign.
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