What is WebMCP?
An emerging, still-early standard that would let an autonomous AI agent discover and call actions directly on a website it visits on its own, without a business or developer configuring a connection ahead of time.
2 min read
Unlike MCP, which needs a server set up in advance, WebMCP's aim is letting an agent that finds a business by itself, not one a human pointed it at, work out what it can do there. How mature the spec is, and how widely it'll be adopted, isn't settled yet. It's a genuinely useful answer to a web that wasn't built for agents, not the same thing as identity, payment or checkout, which still need separate protocols on top of it.
Good for
An agent finding a business on its own, with no connection configured in advance.
Not good for
Identity or payment, and not mature enough yet to treat as settled.
What is agentic commerce?
Commerce where an AI agent, acting on a real person's goal, does some or all of the finding, deciding and buying that a person used to do by hand.
What is MCP?
Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets an AI agent call into a business's own systems, checking live data or triggering a defined action, the way it would check availability or pull a menu.
What is A2A?
Agent2Agent protocol, a standard for how one AI agent hands a task to another agent clearly enough that the second one can trust it and act on it.