Web Agent Protocol (WAP) vs WebMCP
The map lists them as complementary: sites and agents commonly implement both.
| Web Agent Protocol (WAP) WAP | WebMCP | |
|---|---|---|
| Lifecycle step | 5 Act: Do something for me | 5 Act: Do something for me |
| Answers | How does a recorded human browsing session get replayed reliably by an agent later, or turned into a reusable tool another agent can call? | What JavaScript tools can a web page register so an in-browser AI agent can call them directly instead of scraping the DOM? |
| Governed by | Single company (OTA Tech AI); MIT-licensed public GitHub repository; no independent standards process or multi-party governance found | W3C Web Machine Learning Community Group; editors are Brandon Walderman (Microsoft), Khushal Sagar (Google), Dominic Farolino (Google) |
| Status (issuer's words) | Dormant: last commit 2025-06-03 | Draft Community Group Report, dated 4 September 2026; explicitly "not a W3C Standard nor on the W3C Standards Track" |
| Version | unversioned (main branch, 1 tag, last commit 2025-06-03) (2025-06-03) | Draft Community Group Report, 4 September 2026 (2026-09-04) |
| Form / transport | document format | browser API |
| Found at | None — WAP is not a network-discoverable, site-facing protocol. It is a local pipeline: a Chrome extension records a user's browser session, a Python SDK converts the recording into an 'exact-replay' or 'smart-replay' action list, and that action list can be converted into a local MCP server for reuse by any MCP-speaking agent. | none — a client or agent must load the page itself to see whether it registers WebMCP tools; this is a stated limitation of the API ("Clients and browsers must visit a site directly to know if it has callable tools") |
| Implementation | prototype | prototype |
| Evidence | 3 verified, 1 reported | 2 verified |
| Primary use case | Let agents act on my website | Let agents act on my website |
| Last verified | 2026-10-23 (current) | 2026-10-23 (current) |
| Specification | https://github.com/OTA-Tech-AI/web-agent-protocol | https://webmachinelearning.github.io/webmcp/ |
When to use which
- Choose Web Agent Protocol (WAP) when your question is “How does a recorded human browsing session get replayed reliably by an agent later, or turned into a reusable tool another agent can call?” and you accept its maturity: status "Dormant: last commit 2025-06-03", implementation prototype. It is no longer maintained; prefer its successor.
- Choose WebMCP when your question is “What JavaScript tools can a web page register so an in-browser AI agent can call them directly instead of scraping the DOM?” and you accept its maturity: status "Draft Community Group Report, dated 4 September 2026; explicitly "not a W3C Standard nor on the W3C Standards Track"", implementation prototype.
Read the full articles
- Web Agent Protocol (WAP): How does a recorded human browsing session get replayed reliably by an agent later, or turned into a reusable tool another agent can call?
- WebMCP: What JavaScript tools can a web page register so an in-browser AI agent can call them directly instead of scraping the DOM?