Your website can now tell agents what it does, instead of letting them guess
On 25th Aug’26, OpenAI added WebMCP support to the ChatGPT desktop app's built-in browser and to ChatGPT Sites. WebMCP is an experimental open standard from the W3C Web Machine Learning Community Group: a site registers JavaScript functions as tools, with names, descriptions and structured input schemas, and an agent calls them directly rather than reading the HTML and guessing which button does what. Millions of Shopify storefronts are already enabled; Expedia, Instacart and Target are experimenting.
What it actually means
Until now, an agent visiting your site was reverse-engineering it. Scraping the DOM, inferring what your buttons meant, getting it wrong in ways that never appeared in your analytics. WebMCP replaces the guess with a declaration: these are the actions, these are the arguments, this is what happens.
So the agent's understanding of your product is now either something you authored or something it improvised. There is no third option, and the improvised version is already running. Shopify switching on millions of storefronts in one move moved the baseline without most of those merchants doing anything, and everyone else is now being compared against it.
Honest about the stage: experimental standard, and the work is small. Only a handful of functions describing what someone actually comes to your site to do, and you need that inventory regardless of who wins the standard. Worth an afternoon.
The agent's understanding of your product is either something you wrote, or something it guessed.
Source: Search Engine Journal · Sunday 30 August 2026