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Stork Quadrant · How to defend

Your score went down. Here's how to move it up.

None of this is vanity. The first six moves each change a real signal we score, ordered by points-per-effort — top of the list is the biggest unlock for the least work. The last one is here because people keep asking about it, and it is worth zero.

1. Ship an MCP server

+25

The single biggest score lever. An MCP server makes your tool callable by Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, and every IDE that speaks the protocol. If your product is API-backed, the wrapper takes a weekend. Stork will list it.

Submit your MCP →

2. Get on agent surfaces

+20

Anthropic MCP registry. Cursor's tools list. Claude Desktop config repos. ChatGPT GPT store if relevant. The score rewards presence, not just intent. Stork itself counts — being listed here is one of the surfaces we check.

How Stork listing works

3. Add usage-based pricing

+15

Per-seat pricing dies when agents replace seats. If your only tier is $X per user per month, agents either can't buy or won't. Add a metered tier — per call, per token, per request. Even $0.01 minimums signal you're built for the new shape.

4. Headless agent auth

+15

Self-serve API keys, a sandbox tier that doesn't require sales contact, and rate limits that don't immediately throttle agentic workloads. If a developer has to email "hello@" to get an API key, you fail this check.

5. Publish an OpenAPI spec

+10

Drop an openapi.json at a standard path. Even a rough one is better than none. Agents lean on it to call you safely; LLMs use it to generate correct request shapes without hallucinating.

6. Show signs of life

+10

Active changelog with something shipped in the last 90 days. Silence reads as abandonment — to humans, to agents, and to us. A monthly "what we shipped" post is enough.

7. Ship an /llms.txt if you want, but it's worth nothing here

0

This used to be worth five points. As of methodology v1.1 it's worth zero. It takes ten minutes, which makes it trivially gameable, and the independent measurement is unflattering — a 137,000-domain study found 97% of published llms.txt files received zero requests in a month, and no major crawler has confirmed it reads one. We still probe for it, so if that ever changes we'll have the history. Ship it because it's cheap, not because it will move your score or get you cited. The six moves above are the ones that change outcomes.

After you ship the changes

Request a re-score from your tool's Stork page. We'll re-probe Axis 2 and re-run Axis 1 with Sonnet 4.6 to refresh the verdict. One re-score per tool per week.