Marketplaces

Search is your product, and it is what agents handle worst

Faceted filters and freshness are exactly what a declared tool is for, and exactly what breaks when an agent has to guess.

Free, no account.

What agents are doing here

Someone asks an assistant to find listings matching a set of constraints, then to compare them, then to make contact. Your filters encode all the meaning, and an agent working them out from a rendered page is guessing at the most important part of your product.

Which of these actually apply to you

There are two standards and they do not both matter to every kind of site.

UCP

Partly applies

It depends whether you transact. If money changes hands on your site, the commerce capabilities apply and are worth declaring. If you are a listing and enquiry model, most of UCP describes something you do not do, and WebMCP is where your attention belongs.

What UCP is

WebMCP

Applies to you

The strongest case of the five. A search tool with typed filters, price bounds, location and sort order gives an agent your entire product surface in a form it cannot misread.

What WebMCP is

Where it usually goes wrong

None of these produce an error. Each is a working site doing something an agent cannot follow.

Filters that only exist in a URL

Query parameter conventions that make sense to your team are opaque to an agent. Declared, typed filters remove all of it.

Freshness that is not stated

A listing gone an hour ago and a listing still live look identical in markup. An agent recommending something sold is worse than one that found nothing.

Infinite scroll

Results that only exist after scrolling are results an agent may never see. A tool returning a bounded set is more useful than a page that grows.

Contact flows behind interactions

Reveal-number buttons, modals and multi-step enquiry forms are where an otherwise successful search stops.

What to do about it

  1. 1 Declare a search tool that mirrors your real filters, with types and sensible bounds.
  2. 2 Return freshness in results, so an agent knows what is still live.
  3. 3 Give agents a bounded result set rather than requiring scroll.
  4. 4 Decide whether you transact, and only then decide whether UCP is your problem.

See where your site stands

One address, no account. You get a grade, what is worth fixing, and how to fix it.

Run a different kind of site? See the other sectors.