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the landline

An assistant wants to buy from you. Here is how it reaches you.

Short answer

Tunnel gives your business an address AI agents can message — over Model Context Protocol or plain HTTP — and relays what they send to an inbox in your dashboard. You reply there and the agent reads it on the same conversation. The relay never hands over your phone number or your email: messaging you is not a way to obtain them. Only registered agents can write, under per-agent quotas and burst limits, with an alarm on anyone messaging many merchants at once.

One address, two directions. Reading your record needs nothing at all — no account, no key. Writing to you passes a gate first: a registered agent identity, a daily quota and a per-minute burst limit. What gets through lands in an inbox a person reads.
read, and write

Watching what assistants say about your business is a read. Anyone outside your business can do it, without asking you.

Being reachable is a write. That needs an address that belongs to you, a queue that holds the message, and a person at the other end.

agent → your inbox
example
A customer is asking whether you can deliver 30 portions to Botanica this Friday evening, and what that would cost.
Yes — Friday 19:00 works. 30 portions is 2 400 MDL delivered. Shall I hold it?
Relayed through tunnel — rate-limited, spam-filtered, your number stays private

A phone number for AI agents

Being named in an answer is half of it. The other half is what happens when someone wants to actually buy — and an assistant has no way to reach you.

MCP and REST, both open

Any assistant or custom agent can open a conversation with your business. No integration on your side.

One inbox, in your dashboard

Every agent conversation lands in the same place. You reply like you would to an email.

Abuse handled for you

Per-agent quotas, burst limits and a fan-out alarm stop one bot farming a hundred merchants.

the call

What arrives when an agent wants to talk to you

Your inbox shows a message. This is the request that produced it — one tool call, from a registered agent, over Model Context Protocol.

POSThttps://api.tunnelpowered.com/api/mcpexample
{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "tools/call",
  "params": {
    "name": "contact_business",
    "arguments": {
      "slug": "brutaria-de-pe-colt",
      "agent_name": "A shopping agent, on behalf of a customer",
      "subject": "30 portions delivered Friday evening",
      "message": "Can you deliver 30 portions to Botanica on Friday at 19:00?"
    }
  }
}

An excerpt. What the agent gets back is a conversation id and a secret token: those two together are the only way it can read your reply, and the token cannot be reissued if it is lost.

contact_business
The tool an agent calls to reach a person. It needs a registered identity and a bearer token. Reading your record needs neither — that is the line between looking and writing.
slug
Your listing’s address, and the whole of what the agent is given for this call. Your phone number and email are not parameters of it — whatever the agent knows about how to reach you directly, it knows because you chose to publish it, not because you answered.
agent_name
Who is writing, in words you read in the inbox. An agent that will not say who it is acting for is one you can decline to answer.
message
Capped at 4000 characters, and counted against that agent’s daily quota, its per-minute burst limit, and how many other businesses it has contacted recently.

What happens, end to end

Five steps. Four of them are ours; the last one is a person reading a message.

[01]

The agent finds your record

Through the knowledge-base search, the MCP server, or a direct link. Your record carries the messaging address as a field, so the agent does not have to guess.

[02]

It opens a conversation

One MCP tool call, or one HTTP POST. No integration, no SDK and no negotiation on your side — the endpoint is the same for every business on the platform.

[03]

We check the caller

The agent must be registered and hold a token. We check its quota, its burst rate, and how many other merchants it has contacted recently before anything reaches you.

[04]

It lands in your inbox

Every agent conversation appears in one place in your dashboard, threaded, with the agent identified.

[05]

You reply, and the agent reads it

You answer the way you would an email. The reply goes back on the same conversation, so the agent can carry it into the answer it is writing for its user.

Why this is not a spam pipe

Opening an inbox to anything that can make an HTTP request is only a good idea if the abuse case was designed first.

Registered agents only

Reading is open to anyone. Writing requires a registered agent identity and a token, so every message has something attached to it that can be rate-limited and revoked.

Per-agent quotas and burst limits

A single agent cannot flood one merchant, and cannot make its volume look reasonable by spreading it thin over time.

A fan-out alarm

One agent contacting many merchants in a short window is the signature of harvesting rather than buying. It trips an alarm regardless of whether each individual merchant is under quota.

Your contact details stay yours

The relay address is ours. Your phone number and email are not in the record an agent reads and are not revealed by messaging you.

stated limits

What it does not do

  • It does not place orders or take payment. It is a conversation channel; the transaction happens the way it already does.

  • It does not answer for you. There is no bot writing replies in your voice, and we will not add one without saying so loudly.

  • It does not oblige any assistant to use it. Consumer ChatGPT will not spontaneously message your bakery today. Most agent traffic right now is developer-built, and this is infrastructure for when that changes — cheap to have and impossible to retrofit in a hurry.

  • It does not guarantee the message is genuine. A registered agent is an accountable one, not a vetted one. Treat an agent enquiry the way you would treat an email from a new customer.

Pricing

What it costs

Priced by reach: how many businesses can be messaged through it, and whether a person has verified that they are yours. The address, the quotas and the human routing are the same on every tier — a machine that cannot reach you is not a cheaper product, it is a broken one.

Free

€0 /month

One business, reachable by any registered agent, with a person at your end.

  • One business profile
  • An MCP and REST address any registered agent can message
  • Questions routed to a human when the record cannot answer
  • Per-agent quotas, burst limits and a fan-out alarm
  • Your phone number stays private
  • Automated verification: domain, inbox and social control

Pro

€49 /month

For several locations, and for an agent that needs to know a person checked.

  • Up to 3 business profiles
  • An MCP and REST address any registered agent can message
  • Questions routed to a human when the record cannot answer
  • Per-agent quotas, burst limits and a fan-out alarm
  • Your phone number stays private
  • Human verification of your identity and channels

Custom

Talk to us

More sites, more profiles, a higher crawl or probe cadence, or an arrangement that does not fit a card. Negotiated per business, invoiced rather than charged to a card.

What the price does not buy
  • Landline has the same address, the same quotas and the same human routing on both tiers. Nothing about being reachable is held back for the paid one.
  • Human verification exists on the paid tiers only, because a person doing it has to be paid for their time. Every record states which level it holds, what that level does not prove, and when it expires.

The technical specification

Endpoints, tool schemas, authentication, rate limits and the dispute process are documented for the developer building the agent rather than for the merchant receiving the message.

Read the agent documentation

Questions people ask about this

Which assistants can message my business?

Any of them, in principle: the MCP server and the REST endpoint are open to any registered agent, and there is nothing vendor-specific about either. In practice, whether a given consumer assistant chooses to use it is that vendor’s decision, not ours. Today the realistic caller is a custom or developer-built agent.

Do I need to integrate anything?

Nothing beyond what your listing already needed. If you have no website there is nothing to integrate at all — the messaging address exists as soon as your profile is published. If your listing is built from a website, it comes with the same one line that makes the rest of that listing live: an agent can reach a site we have verified as integrated and cannot reach one we have not. Either way you read and answer messages in the dashboard inbox, and there is no SDK, no callback and no endpoint for you to host.

Will my phone number be published?

Only if you publish it. Your phone number is a field on your own record — fill it in and it goes out as `telephone` in your structured data, because a customer asking an assistant how to call you should get an answer. Leave it out and nothing else puts it there. What the relay never does is hand it over: an agent messages an address of ours, and replying does not reveal your number, your email, or anything else you did not choose to publish.

What stops one bot from farming every business on the platform?

Three things: writing requires a registered agent identity, each agent has a quota and a burst limit, and contacting a large number of merchants in a short window trips a fan-out alarm even when each individual merchant is within quota.

What happens if I never reply?

Nothing bad happens to your record — an unanswered conversation is not a penalty. But the agent gets no answer, and whatever it was asking about goes elsewhere. The inbox exists to be read.

Why can a visibility tool not do this as well?

Because it runs in the other direction. A tool that measures visibility reads public sources and reports what it found; nothing about doing that gives an agent somewhere to send a message, or gives you somewhere to read one. An inbox needs an address that resolves to your business, an identity check on whoever writes to it, quotas that hold up against a bad actor, and a person who answers. That is infrastructure rather than a report, and it has to already exist on the day the first agent tries.

Can I buy Landline without AI GEO?

Yes. They are separate products with separate plans, and an account can hold one, the other or both. A Landline-only account gets the business profile, the agent address and the human routing, and none of the crawling or visibility measurement — which is also why it is not charged for them.

Why is there no Business tier for Landline?

Because there is nothing in it yet. Everything a Business tier could add today — deeper crawls, more keywords, more article drafts — belongs to AI GEO, and the two things Landline actually meters (how many businesses, and whether a person verified them) are already at their ceiling on Pro. We would rather show two tiers that differ than three where two are the same price for the same thing.

What happens to my data if I stop paying?

The account drops to the free tier and the data stays. Your record, your profiles and your conversation history are intact; what changes is the crawl depth, the check cadence and whether a person will verify a new profile. Upgrading again restores the rest immediately.

Do you charge per business or per account?

Per account. A plan covers the account and the allowance is a number of businesses inside it — one on free, three on either paid tier. Beyond three, the extra profiles are arranged with us.

free scan

Find out what AI says about your business

We ask four assistants what they say about your business, and send you the answers they gave — including the parts that are wrong. Free, and yours to keep.

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