Google releases preview of WebMCP – how AI agents interact with websites

Google announced an early preview of WebMCP, which is a protocol for how AI agents interact with websites. “WebMCP aims to provide a standard way for exposing structured tools, ensuring AI agents can perform actions on your side with increased speed, reliability, and precision,” wrote André Cipriani Bandarra from Google.

WebMCP enables developers to communicate with LLMs via your website about the actions certain buttons or links take. WebMCP allows websites to explicitly publish a “Tool Contract.” It uses a new browser API (navigator.modelContext). Instead of the AI guessing, the website provides a structured list of tools (e.g., function buyTicket(destination, date)). The AI can then “call” these functions directly.

Structured interactions for the agentic web. WebMCP proposes two new APIs that allow browser agents to take action on behalf of the user:

• Declarative API: Perform standard actions that can be defined directly in HTML forms.
• Imperative API: Perform complex, more dynamic interactions that require JavaScript execution.

These APIs serve as a bridge, making your website “agent-ready” and enabling more reliable and performant agent workflows compared to raw DOM actuation.

Use cases. Here are the use cases Google posted for an AI agent that can handle complex tasks for your users with confidence and speed.

• Travel: Users could more easily get the exact flights they want, by allowing the agent to search, filter results, and handle bookings using structured data to ensure accurate results every time.
• Customer support: Help users create detailed customer support tickets, by enabling agents to fill in all of the necessary technical details automatically.
• Ecommerce: Users can better shop your products when agents can easily find what they’re looking for, configure particular shopping options, and navigate checkout flows with precision.

How to access the preview. You can apply for the preview to WebMCP over here.

Why we care. Agentic experiences are the future of search and possibly SEO. Dan Petrovic called this the biggest shift in technical SEO since structured data. Glenn Gabe called this a big deal.

It is definitely worth exploring these new protocols.

View the full article