When I walk a company through their Kin Score and the listing of their public API presence and agentic readiness, I get a variety of responses depending on what the score is, but also on where they are in their API journey, and now their agentic journey. One thing I hear quite regularly is, “well, it doesn’t measure what we have, because we have a lot of partner APIs you can’t see.” To which I always reply, “well, your competition has those as public APIs.”
This is a common theme I am seeing as I profile industries and areas (tags) as part of my API Evangelist work. Companies have an awareness of their competition, but they have rarely ever evaluated it on a programmatic level. They may have superficially looked at their competitor’s website, and used one of the many services that will provide a competitive analysis, but none of those approaches compare the programmatic nature or the agentic readiness of a market.
The result is that folks produce their APIs, sometimes with a finger on the pulse of what their customers need, but without a wider awareness of the market – and without any sense of what their future customers will see when they evaluate that market, let alone what their future customers’ agents will see. Hiding your API docs means you are hiding them from the agents your customers are using. Those agents don’t know to knock on your door, give you a call, and speak with sales about getting access to your API documentation. And publishing your API documentation publicly doesn’t mean you are giving away free and open access to your APIs.
All APIs are partner APIs. Hiding your API documentation does not prevent your competition from gaining access to it. It just prevents your future customers from gaining access to it. If you don’t have a public API portal, and you are still gatekeeping your API documentation in 2026, I guarantee you are handing future customers over to your competition – because their documentation is out in the open, consumable by search engine crawlers, and being used to train the next generation of LLMs. If you think gatekeeping your API documentation makes business sense, you aren’t as far along in your API journey as you think you are, and you are further behind in your agentic readiness than your competition is.
