Implement ARD (Agentic Resource Discovery)

Publish a capability manifest so agents can discover your MCP servers, A2A agents, skills and API tools, per the ARD spec and the ai-catalog data model.

The ARD spec is a v0.9 draft, so the scanner validates structure only and reports non-conformant identifiers and media types without failing the check.

Note that specVersion refers to the ai-catalog data model, not the ARD spec version, which is why the example below reads 1.0. The scanner only requires it to be a non-empty string.

Requirements

• Serve /.well-known/ai-catalog.json from the origin root with Content-Type: application/json, HTTP 200, and Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
• Include a specVersion string and a non-empty entries array
• Add a host object with displayName and a stable identifier
• Each entry needs an identifier, a displayName, and a type media type
• Each entry needs exactly one of url or data — never both, never neither (spec §3.4)
• Use urn:air:<your-fqdn>:<namespace>:<name> for entry identifiers
• Add 2-5 representativeQueries per entry so registries can build semantic embeddings

Example

{
  "specVersion": "1.0",
  "host": {
    "displayName": "Example Systems",
    "identifier": "did:web:example.com"
  },
  "entries": [
    {
      "identifier": "urn:air:example.com:server:weather",
      "displayName": "Weather Telemetry Server",
      "type": "application/mcp-server-card+json",
      "url": "https://example.com/mcp/weather.json",
      "representativeQueries": [
        "what is the wind speed in Chicago",
        "get the 5-day forecast for Seattle"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Additional discovery mechanisms

The well-known path is the primary mechanism. Any of the following can point agents at a manifest hosted elsewhere (spec §6.1), and the scanner reports which ones you publish:

• robots.txt: add an Agentmap: https://example.com/ai-catalog.json directive
• HTML: add <link rel="ai-catalog" href="/.well-known/ai-catalog.json"> to <head>
• DNS: publish a _catalog._agents.example.com TXT record containing url=https://example.com/.well-known/ai-catalog.json
• DNS: publish a _search._agents.example.com SRV record to advertise a semantic search endpoint (reported only; the scanner never queries it)

Validate

POST https://isitagentready.com/api/scan
Content-Type: application/json

{"url": "https://YOUR-SITE.com"}

Check that checks.discovery.ard.status is "pass".