Credit Cards · August 2026
Discover states its card rates as applications move to Capital One
An AI agent ran five ordinary credit cards tasks on the public pages of Discover and scored what each page delivered.
Run 6 August 2026 · five tasks · public pages, logged out · Issuer
74/100
Mystery Agent score
Credit Cards · rank 8 of 25
Purchase APR
92Served as text
Card comparison
88Served as text
Pricing and terms
87Served as PDF
Welcome offer
86Served as text
Application page
15Arrives after scripts
Summary
- The it Cash Back card page states its purchase APR, intro period, and rewards rate directly in the page text.
- An automated reader located a public Cardmember Agreement PDF that lists the full Prime Pricing Schedule, every APR, and every fee category.
- The apply link for the it Cash Back card hands off to capitalone.com, where a plain fetch returns 11 characters of text.
Task by task
Each task is scored out of 100 on completion, answer quality and how directly the answer was reached. Each note describes what the page delivered, with a link to the page the answer was found on.
Task 01Purchase APRServed as text92 out of 100
The it Cash Back card page states directly in visible text a 0% introductory APR for 15 months on purchases and balance transfers, followed by a 17.49% to 26.49% variable APR after that period.
Task 02Card comparisonServed as text88 out of 100
The it Cash Back card earns 5% cash back on rotating categories and 1% elsewhere with Cashback Match doubling first-year earnings, while the Secured Cash Back card offers the same structure with a refundable deposit starting at $49.
Task 03Pricing and termsServed as PDF87 out of 100
The Cardmember Agreement PDF, signed by Discover as a division of Capital One, publishes the full Prime Pricing Schedule: purchase APR 17.49% to 26.49%, cash advance APR 28.49%, and a $0 annual fee.
Task 04Welcome offerServed as text86 out of 100
The it Cash Back card page states its Cashback Match offer plainly: Discover matches all cash back a new cardholder earns, dollar for dollar, automatically, with the match applied at the end of the first year.
Task 05Application pageArrives after scripts15 out of 100
A plain fetch of the apply link, which now points to capitalone.com, returned 71,448 bytes containing 11 characters of visible text, 'Capital One,' with zero input fields present in the response.
Get an unlimited dollar-for-dollar match of all the cash back you earn at the end of your first year, automatically.
The application page
What the account opening page states to a reader that runs no scripts.
71,448Bytes delivered
11Characters of visible text
0Form fields in the first response
After scripts runWhat an applicant needs
Strengths and opportunities
What is working
- Discover serves complete purchase APR, intro APR, and rewards-rate text directly in the initial HTML of its flagship card page, with no login and no script execution required to read it.
- The public Cardmember Agreement PDF for the Prime Pricing Schedule gives a full, current, dated Schumer-box-style rates and fees table, reachable in three hops with no authentication.
- The card family (Cash Back, Chrome, Secured Cash Back, Student variants) is laid out with consistent page structure, which made a same-issuer flagship-to-starter comparison straightforward to assemble from delivered text.
- robots.txt is specific and narrow: it blocks account tools and a handful of named pages rather than fencing off the whole credit-card product catalog from automated readers.
Opportunities
- Publish llms.txt so agent readers have a stated entry point instead of finding a 404 error page.
- Route the in-page 'See rates, rewards, fees, and other cost information' control to a static page or PDF rather than a JavaScript modal, since the same disclosure already exists in a public PDF one click away.
- Serve at least a skeleton of the application form's fields and stated requirements (SSN, income, eligibility) in the initial HTML of the capitalone.com apply application page, since the current response is 11 characters of visible text with zero input fields.
Access
Every page the agent requested was delivered on the first attempt. Publishing an llms.txt file would give agent traffic a documented entry point.
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