Web Bot Auth directory — agent readiness

Why an agent cares

It is how an automated client proves its identity instead of being judged on a user-agent string, which is the basis of every allowlist that is not guesswork. We read the published key directory, so the population that can get it wrong is signing operators.

Adoption

Early production. Several independent organisations run it in production, though it is still niche on the open web.

Direction of travel: ▲ rising, as at 2026-08-22.

Shipping is ahead of the standard: OpenAI signs in production, Cloudflare, Vercel and Akamai verify, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore signs by default, while the IETF working group has adopted no document of its own.

Adopter	Depth	Evidence
OpenAI (signs ChatGPT agent and Operator requests)	`production`	help.openai.com
Cloudflare (signed agents, Verified Bots)	`production`	blog.cloudflare.com
Vercel (verifies signatures)	`production`	vercel.com
Amazon (Bedrock AgentCore Browser)	`default-on`	coronium.io

What we check

Absence is never a finding. Every check below runs only once webBotAuthPresent is true, so a site that has not adopted this is not assessed on it and appears in no report. 6 of these 6 can fail it. In a Lumar crawl these land on one row per site, in the crawl-level table where itemType is web_bot_auth.

Check	Severity	Raises	On whose authority
`webBotAuthMalformedDirectory`	high	conformance, usability	specification (RFC 7517)
`webBotAuthMissingKeys`	high	usability	specification (draft-meunier-webbotauth-httpsig-directory-00 (2026-06-26))
`webBotAuthInvalidKey`	high	conformance, usability	specification (RFC 7517 + RFC 9421 (per draft-meunier-webbotauth-httpsig-directory-00 §3))
`webBotAuthPrivateKeyExposed`	high	conformance, usability, security	specification (RFC 7517)
`webBotAuthUnregisteredAlgName`	medium	conformance, usability	specification (draft-meunier-webbotauth-httpsig-directory-00 (2026-06-26) §3)
`webBotAuthWrongMediaType`	medium	conformance, usability	specification (draft-meunier-webbotauth-httpsig-directory-00 (2026-06-26))

Examples

Both of these are fixtures the test suite runs through the real collector, not snippets written for a document: the first is a shape we score as valid, the second is one we flag.

correctjsontest/e2e/test-pages/trust/correct.web-bot-auth.json

{
  "keys": [
    {
      "kty": "OKP",
      "crv": "Ed25519",
      "x": "JrQLj5P_89iXES9-vFgrIy29clF9CC_oPPsw3c5D0bs"
    }
  ]
}

present but wrongjsontest/e2e/test-pages/trust/issues.web-bot-auth.json

{
  "keys": [
    {
      "kty": "OKP",
      "crv": "Ed25519",
      "x": "tooShort"
    }
  ]
}

Specifications

Document	Revision	Kind
draft-meunier-webbotauth-httpsig-directory (the directory format we implement)	`-00, 2026-06-26`	specification
RFC 9421 — HTTP Message Signatures	`RFC 9421`	specification
Cloudflare — Web Bot Auth verification	`living`	vendor profile
Google — Web Bot Auth for crawlers	`living`	vendor profile

Last re-read against the published documents: 2026-08-12.

On pinning it. This draft formally replaces draft-meunier-http-message-signatures-directory, which expired at -05. Note that the IETF working group has adopted no document of its own: as of 2026-08-12 all nine active drafts are individual submissions.