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The Website Specification

A new website specification, "What a good website does," has been published as a platform-agnostic technical standard covering ten categories including SEO, accessibility, security, and agent readiness. The specification maps each requirement to widely-accepted standards from organizations like WHATWG, W3C, and IETF, and is available as an open MCP server for AI agents to query. The project aims to provide a definitive, community-maintained checklist for building modern websites that serve both humans and automated agents.

read2 min publishedMay 31, 2026

A platform-agnostic specification of the technical features every decent website should have — from <title>

to /.well-known/security.txt

, from WCAG contrast to llms.txt

. Written for humans and agents.

Categories #

Ten areas, mapped to widely-accepted standards.

All topics →

Foundations

14The HTML, head, and document basics every page needs.

SEO

13Search visibility — robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, structured data.

Accessibility

20WCAG-aligned rules so people of all abilities can use the site.

Security

12Headers, transport, and policies that keep visitors safe.

Well-Known URIs

9Standard, agreed-upon paths under /.well-known/.

Agent Readiness

18Things that make a site legible to AI agents and crawlers.

Performance

19Core Web Vitals, caching, images, fonts, network behaviour.

Privacy

6Consent, signals, and respecting visitor choice.

Resilience

5Graceful failure — error pages, offline, redirects.

Internationalisation

12Language, locale, direction, and translated content.

Standards, not opinions

Each topic links back to the source standard — WHATWG, W3C, IETF RFCs, WCAG, MDN, and the organisations defining the modern web.

Platform agnostic

Whether you ship WordPress, Drupal, TYPO3, Next.js, Astro, Hugo, a Django app, or plain HTML, the spec is the spec. Implementation hints follow it, not the other way round.

Built in the open

Every page has an Edit on GitHub link. PRs welcome. Sources credited on every page.

Let your agent query the spec. #

The whole spec is available as an open MCP server — read-only, no auth — plus a published Agent Skill that teaches any compatible agent when and how to use it. Per-page Markdown is available via /llms.txt

and Accept: text/markdown

on any spec URL.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "specification-website": {
      "transport": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.specification.website/mcp"
    }
  }
}

How to use this site #

  • 01

Audit

Run through the

checklist. Each item is a “does the site do this — yes or no.” - 02

Learn

Click into any item for what it is, why it matters, and how to implement it.

  • 03

Improve

Found a gap, a stale fact, or a missing topic? Open a PR. Sources required.

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