API discoverability — the ability for developers to actually find your API and use it — has always been important, but it’s becoming increasingly more important as AI agents become more prevalent.
“If your APIs are lying around and they’re not discoverable or they’re not documented, then it’s going to be very hard for people to build agents,” Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder of Postman, told SD Times at POST/CON, the company’s user conference held this week in Los Angeles.
RELATED: Postman introduces Agent Mode to integrate the power of AI agents into Postman’s core capabilities
API as the building blocks for agents was a key theme at the event. Sterling Chin, senior developer advocate at Postman, told SD Times that the industry needs to get to a point where an API is so easy to digest that it’s just like building with LEGO.
“You grab the pieces that you need, put them together, and then you have a full application and you make an agentic workflow out of it where if this happens, an agent can start running and you can deploy it and redeploy and fix it without having to touch code. I think that’s the future of agentic AI,” he said.
At the conference, Postman announced that it launched a network for verified MCP servers. “We basically took all the remote MCP servers available today, verified them, and put them on the public network because everybody’s gonna need a verified place soon. People started with unverified MCP servers, and there is a risk there that if you just start having your agents be connected to unverified MCP servers, it’s just like remote injection,” Asthana said.
Postman also released an update to its platform that enables any public API on its network of over 100,000 public APIs to be turned into an MCP server, making it more important than ever that API developers ensure their APIs are discoverable by the people that will want to use them.
Chin said that what is typically seen of APIs is only the tip of the iceberg. “We only see the top maybe 10 percent. Those are the external APIs that get all the hype. The majority of services are internal to us, and those are the ones that when MCP starts to really take off, those are the APIs that are going to blow everyone away.”
Making your APIs stand out
Allen Helton, ecosystem engineer at Momento, maker of reliability solutions and a customer of Postman, told SD Times that the most important benefit they get out of Postman is that it allows their APIs to be easily discovered by developers.
“Being a small tech startup, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and it’s hard to get your name out there and have brand recognition when you’re just starting out,” he said. “We build inside of Postman to help people discover us and then subsequently when they do, they figure out what we’re about and how to use the products.”
He said that the Postman network is great because if you’re doing anything in public, you’re on it, and that means you can come up in search and be discovered.
“If I am looking for services that offer caching, Momento is going to slide up to the top because we’ve done a lot of work on standing out,” he said.
He has a few main recommendations he’d give to other API developers looking to stand out. First off is to make sure they’re not standing out in a bad way by ensuring they’re doing basic best practices that every API owner should do, such as setting up easy auth.
“Postman has a great feature where whenever you paste a URL into a request, it recognizes ‘oh, this is Momento, do you need help getting your auth token or API key?’ And it actually walks you through exactly how to get it and then puts that API key in the right spot for you.”
Another recommendation is to make sure your public profile is filled out. The public profile includes everything an API publisher owns, including workspaces, collections, and API specs. He advises everyone to have a profile picture and links to their social media and website on that page.
Getting verified by Postman will also help, as verified publishers get a badge that essentially proves that you’re the domain owner, increasing confidence among API consumers. Postman’s requirements for getting verified include things like having a verified domain, setting up authentication for public APIs, and having good documentation.
“What’s nice about how Momento has used the Postman API Network is if you build things in a way that tells a story and that pushes your branding, it really helps to get noticed,” Helton said. “It helps with your search engine results. It helps people get a very clear and immediate idea of what they can do with your services. Just kind of weave in your personality into all the different areas that Postman allows you to have rich text and images.”
Another popular API publisher on the network is PayPal, and Brenden Lane, senior director of developer products at the company, said that the discoverability aspect of the network is also a big part of their strategy.
“We are a very big ecosystem,” he said. “We have a lot of tools that might be useful for different people or companies. One of the things that Postman really helps us do is explain very simply and clearly what you need and how to hook it up.”
PayPal launched its own MCP Server as a Postman Collection earlier this week. According to Lane, this opens up access to a number of commerce tools that are useful for AI.
“The public network makes it very easy for people to understand and discover tools across different companies or different types of tools, and then make it very easy to compose experiences together,” he said.
Disclosure: The reporter’s trip to POST/CON, including flights, hotel, and meals, was covered by Postman. The reporter also received a bag of conference merchandise.
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