Your clients are about to ask you a question you may not have a tidy answer to yet: “Can ChatGPT book with us through our website?”
Most agencies answer that today with a polite shrug or a chatbot quote. Neither is quite what the client means.
What clients are actually asking for
AI assistants are starting to act for people. They compare options, fill in forms and make bookings. When an assistant lands on a website today, it reads the page and guesses which button to press.
WebMCP is the proposed web standard that removes the guessing. The website hands the assistant a short, labelled list of actions it may take, such as “request a quote” or “check availability”, with clear inputs for each one.
For an agency, that is a build task, not a new platform. The tools live in your client’s own site code. Nothing gets migrated and nobody has to learn a new dashboard.
Why this lands on your desk, not the client’s
- It touches forms, booking flows and checkout logic you already maintain.
- Every tool needs a permission decision: what may the assistant do on its own, and what needs a person to confirm.
- The standard is still a W3C Community Group draft, so the details move. Someone has to keep up.
That last point is the honest catch. Early standards change. Building on one means budgeting for updates and telling clients so up front, before they hear it from someone else.
Where to start with a client
Pick one journey that already earns money and already has a form. A quote request. A table booking. A stock check.
Turn that one form into a tool, test it with real assistants, and compare the results with last month’s numbers before you sell the next one. The declarative route, which adds a few attributes to an existing HTML form, is often enough for a first tool. Our WebMCP business briefing shows the code for both routes and where WebMCP works today.
What we do alongside agencies
The Agency Partner Programme gives your team implementation playbooks, tool design reviews on live client projects, and white-label delivery and testing support. Your clients, your brand. We stay in the background, which suits us fine.
Explaining it to the client
Often the hardest part is the conversation, not the code. A business owner does not need the specification. They need to know what changes for their customers and what stays under their control.
If your client runs a single-location South African business, our sister site has a plain-language explainer of what WebMCP is you can send them before the meeting. It saves you twenty minutes of slides.
The next step
Choose one client, one form, one journey. If you would like a second pair of eyes on the tool design before you build, talk to us about the partner programme.
Free worksheet: Your first three WebMCP tools (PDF). Pick the three jobs on your website to make ready for AI agents first. No email needed.
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