API & endpoints

The Actuant API

What Actuant exposes over HTTP: an MCP server for programmatic use, a set of public endpoints that need no auth, and dashboard-only routes that will reject an API key.

Last updated 2026-08-08

Everything programmatic lives at https://www.actuant.dev. There are three tiers, and knowing which one you are talking to saves the most common hour lost here.

The three tiers

TierAuthWhat it is
MCP/api/mcpact_ key or OAuth tokenThe programmatic API. JSON-RPC 2.0 over Streamable HTTP. Every audit, report and fix runs through here.
PublicNoneBadge SVG, status, benchmark, and the machine-readable documents agents fetch.
DashboardClerk session cookiePoll endpoints the web app uses. Not reachable with an API key.

There is no REST API for audits

This is the thing worth reading twice. /api/scans/{id} and /api/audits/{id} exist, return clean JSON, and appear in your network tab — so they look like the API. They authenticate with a Clerk session cookie. An act_ bearer key gets 401 Unauthorized from them and always will.

Use MCP, not the poll routes

If you want to run an audit from a script, a CI job, or another service, you want the MCP endpoint. It is a normal HTTP POST with a JSON body — you do not need an MCP client library to call it.

Why MCP is the whole API

Rather than maintain a REST surface and an MCP surface that drift apart, there is one. The 52 checks, the crawl, the metering, the plan gates and the reports are all reached the same way whether the caller is Claude Code, a cron job, or curl.

The practical consequence: anything an agent can do, a script can do, with the same credentials and the same responses.