Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) is a proposed open standard for the discovery layer that sits in front of every agentic protocol — the step before invocation, where a client asks "what is available for this task?" and gets back a ranked set of MCP servers, agent cards, skills, workflows and APIs it could use. Publishers describe their resources once in an AI Catalog manifest at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json on their own domain, anchored by a urn:air: URN derived from that domain; independent discovery services crawl those manifests and expose them through a small REST interface whose only mandatory endpoint is POST /search. It deliberately does not execute anything — MCP, A2A and OpenAPI keep that job — and it deliberately does not try to be the one registry, inverting the submit-to-a-registry model in favour of publish-to-your-own-domain. Published as a v0.9 draft proposal on 28 May 2026 under Apache 2.0 by three authors at Microsoft, Google and Hugging Face, with a contributors wall of eleven organizations. It has no foundation, no charter, no participant roster and no working groups; it does have nine public architecture decision records and an official conformance CLI. This repo profiles it as a coalition with artifacts, and measures the distance between the specification and the endpoint.

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) publishes 4 API contracts indexed on the APIs.io network, including Agents API, Explore API, Search API, and 1 more. Tagged areas include Agentic Resource Discovery, ARD, AI Catalog, Agent Discovery, and Discovery.

The Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) catalog on APIs.io includes 1 Spectral governance ruleset.

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)’s developer surface includes FAQ, getting-started guide, and 28 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

27.6/100 thin ▬ flat Agent 16/100 agent aware Front door AI 6/6 dominant Heartbeat 60/100 slowing Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-11-13 · rubric v0.28.0 · Show this score on your site →

1 published contract

Agentic Resource DiscoveryARDAI CatalogAgent Discovery DiscoveryWell-Known URIMedia Types Federation MCP A2A Agent Skills Standards Standards Body SpecificationMachine Readability

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-11-13 · rubric v0.28.0

Composite quality — 27.6/100 · thin

Contract Quality 9.2 / 19

Developer Ergonomics 3.2 / 15

Access Clarity 1.0 / 15

Operational Transparency 2.8 / 10

Contract Governance 1.2 / 9

Discoverability 4.3 / 8

Regulatory Posture 1.6 / 15

Create-or-Update Ergonomics 0.0 / 10

Agent readiness — 16/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Pagination 5 / 5

Distinct Operations 3 / 3

MCP Tool Quality 6 / 6

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Horizontal (data, software, accessibility, platform) regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created. Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet, not penalised by it.

The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Show this score on your site.

It updates itself when the score changes. Paste this where you link to your API docs:

<a href="https://apis.io/providers/agentic-resource-discovery/"><img src="https://apis.io/badge/agentic-resource-discovery/card.svg" alt="Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) on APIs.io — Kin Score by API Evangelist"></a>

Other styles, a README pill and a shields.io endpoint are on the badge page.

Raise your score.

Agent readiness — checks not met, largest first (exact, from this profile):

MCP Server +12 pts — deployment.mode + probe verdict on the mcp/ manifest, not the pointer; an unprobed slug falls back to authorship Ask about this →
Agentic Access Contract +10 pts — agentic_access artifact present (x-agentic-access), graded by author Ask about this →
Machine-Readable Auth +10 pts — a served openid-configuration/oauth-authorization-server carrying `issuer` (served), else the securitySchemes class in the provider OpenAPIs — bound (mutualTLS, DPoP, Signature) > negotiable (oauth2 authorizationCode/clientCredentials, openIdConnect) > bearer (http bearer, apiKey) Ask about this →
Idempotency +9 pts — OpenAPI mutating operations declare an idempotency key — a header, a request-body property, or a named de-duplication token whose own description says so (verified); else common[].type matches /idempoten/i (documented) Ask about this →
Stable Error Semantics +8 pts — OpenAPI $refs a shared error schema across 4xx/5xx responses (verified), else common[].type includes ErrorCatalog / ErrorCodes / DeclineCodes Ask about this →
A2A Agent Card +8 pts — a2a/-a2a.yml manifest, graded on conformance.grade against A2A 1.0.0 Ask about this →

12 more unmet checks in the Agent Readiness table above.

Kin Score — facets with the most composite points still available (weight × headroom):

Access Clarity scores 6.4 — up to +18.7 composite points Ask about this →
Developer Ergonomics scores 21.4 — up to +15.7 composite points Ask about this →
Contract Quality scores 49.3 — up to +12.7 composite points Ask about this →

Each check links to what satisfies it. Publish the artifact, or tell us where it already lives, and the score moves on the next scoring run.

Not sure how this applies to your stack? Ask about any one item. Kin Lane reads every question, looks at your profile and your situation, and replies with what a fix would take — scoped to that one area, priced up front, yours whether you ship it or not. Ask a question →

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from the provider profile at artifacts.apis.io/agentic-resource-discovery/apis.yml: open an issue on github.com/api-evangelist/agentic-resource-discovery to ask a question or point us at an artifact you publish. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Standards implemented 5

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

Agent Skills

tagged — the provider's own APIs.json carries the standard as a tag; implementation not verified

Agent2Agent

tagged — the provider's own APIs.json carries the standard as a tag; implementation not verified

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

tagged — the provider's own APIs.json carries the standard as a tag; implementation not verified

Specification

tagged — the provider's own APIs.json carries the standard as a tag; implementation not verified

OpenAPI

measured — observed by APIs.io (published)

APIs 4

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

AI Catalog Manifest

The publishing half of the standard — the JSON manifest a domain serves at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json declaring who the host is and what agentic resources it offers, each entr...

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Agents API

The Agents API from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) — 1 operation(s) for agents.

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Explore API

The Explore API from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) — 1 operation(s) for explore.

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Search API

The Search API from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) — 1 operation(s) for search.

Terms of Service 1

What its API terms permit and prohibit, quoted from its own page.

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)

3 quoted statements, read from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)'s own page on 2026-11-09.

TERMS

Data License 1

How its data and outputs may be reused, quoted from its own terms.

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)

2 quoted statements, read from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)'s own page on 2026-11-09.

LICENSE

Spectral Rules 1

Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs. Counts are the severity each rule declares, not results of running them.

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) API Rules

44 rules · 41 error-severity 2 warn-severity 1 info-severity

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 1

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

AICatalogManifest

3 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Resources

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

GettingStarted

GettingStarted

Documentation 3

Reference material describing how the API behaves

ContributionGuide

ContributionGuide

Specification

Specification

ReferenceImplementation

ReferenceImplementation

Design & Contract 1

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Conformance

Conformance

Build 3

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

CodeOfConduct

CodeOfConduct

SourceCode

SourceCode

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

Access & Security 1

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

SecurityPolicy

SecurityPolicy

Operate 3

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

IssueTracker

IssueTracker

Releases

Releases

FAQ

FAQ

Commercial 3

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

License

License

UsageTerms

UsageTerms

DataLicense

DataLicense

Company 1

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

Other 14

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Contributing

Participants

Governance

TestSuite

Adopters

Adoption

People

Companies

Leads

Repositories

Contributors

WorkingGroups

Taxonomy

Glossary

Scroll for all 14

Source (apis.yml)

aid: agentic-resource-discovery
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/agentic-resource-discovery/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
name: Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)
deliveryModel:
  model: unknown
  license_evidence:
    not_product:
    - agent-card/ai-catalog
    - ards-project/ard-spec
  open_source: unknown
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
  confidence: low
  source:
  - openapi
  - repository-not-product
  generated: '2026-09-25'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-11-13'
  method: derived
specificationVersion: '0.23'
kind: standard
x-type: standards-body
x-category: Specification
x-host: null
x-host-structure: null
created: 2026-05-19 00:00:00+00:00
modified: 2026-07-31
position: Producing
access: 3rd-Party
description: 'Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) is a proposed open standard for the discovery layer that sits in front of every
  agentic protocol — the step before invocation, where a client asks "what is available for this task?" and gets back a ranked
  set of MCP servers, agent cards, skills, workflows and APIs it could use. Publishers describe their resources once in an
  AI Catalog manifest at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json on their own domain, anchored by a urn:air: URN derived from that domain;
  independent discovery services crawl those manifests and expose them through a small REST interface whose only mandatory
  endpoint is POST /search. It deliberately does not execute anything — MCP, A2A and OpenAPI keep that job — and it deliberately
  does not try to be the one registry, inverting the submit-to-a-registry model in favour of publish-to-your-own-domain. Published
  as a v0.9 draft proposal on 28 May 2026 under Apache 2.0 by three authors at Microsoft, Google and Hugging Face, with a
  contributors wall of eleven organizations. It has no foundation, no charter, no participant roster and no working groups;
  it does have nine public architecture decision records and an official conformance CLI. This repo profiles it as a coalition
  with artifacts, and measures the distance between the specification and the endpoint.'
x-docs-platform: mkdocs
x-docs-platform-confidence: medium
x-docs-platform-checked: 2026-09-17
tags:
- Agentic Resource Discovery
- ARD
- AI Catalog
- Agent Discovery
- Discovery
- Well-Known URI
- Media Types
- Federation
- MCP
- A2A
- Agent Skills
- Standards
- Standards Body
- Specification
- Machine Readability
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/agentic-resource-discovery.png
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: info@apievangelist.com
  X: apievangelist
  url: https://apievangelist.com
apis:
- aid: agentic-resource-discovery:ai-catalog-manifest
  name: AI Catalog Manifest
  description: 'The publishing half of the standard — the JSON manifest a domain serves at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json declaring
    who the host is and what agentic resources it offers, each entry typed by media type, identified by a domain-anchored
    urn:air: URN, and carrying an optional trustManifest for identity, compliance attestations, provenance and a detached
    JWS signature. Defined upstream by the ai-catalog project and extended here with discovery attributes. This is the artifact
    an API provider actually has to write.'
  humanURL: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/ai_catalog_spec/
  tags:
  - Discovery
  - Metadata
  - Well-Known URI
  properties:
  - type: JSONSchema
    url: json-schema/ai-catalog.schema.json
  - type: Specification
    url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/ai_catalog_spec/
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/how_to_publish/
  - type: SourceCode
    url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog
- aid: agentic-resource-discovery:agentic-resource-discovery-agents-api
  name: Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Agents API
  description: The Agents API from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) — 1 operation(s) for agents.
  humanURL: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/
  tags:
  - Agents
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/agentic-resource-discovery-agents-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Specification
    url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/how_ard_works/
  - type: TestSuite
    url: conformance/README.md
- aid: agentic-resource-discovery:agentic-resource-discovery-explore-api
  name: Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Explore API
  description: The Explore API from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) — 1 operation(s) for explore.
  humanURL: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/
  tags:
  - Explore
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/agentic-resource-discovery-explore-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Specification
    url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/how_ard_works/
  - type: TestSuite
    url: conformance/README.md
- aid: agentic-resource-discovery:agentic-resource-discovery-search-api
  name: Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Search API
  description: The Search API from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) — 1 operation(s) for search.
  humanURL: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/
  tags:
  - Search
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/agentic-resource-discovery-search-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Specification
    url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/how_ard_works/
  - type: TestSuite
    url: conformance/README.md
common:
- type: IssueTracker
  url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog/issues
- type: SecurityPolicy
  url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog/blob/main/SECURITY.md
- type: CodeOfConduct
  url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
- type: ContributionGuide
  url: https://github.com/Agent-Card/ai-catalog/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
- type: Website
  url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org
- type: Specification
  url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/spec/
- type: SourceCode
  url: https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/ards-project
- type: License
  url: https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec/blob/main/LICENSE
- type: Contributing
  url: https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec#contributing
- type: Participants
  url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/contributors/
- type: Governance
  url: governance/agentic-resource-discovery-governance.yml
- type: Conformance
  url: conformance/agentic-resource-discovery-conformance.yml
- type: TestSuite
  url: https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec/tree/main/conformance
- type: ReferenceImplementation
  url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/ref_implementations/
- type: Adopters
  url: adoption/agentic-resource-discovery-adoption.yml
- type: Adoption
  url: adoption/agentic-resource-discovery-adoption.yml
- type: People
  url: people/agentic-resource-discovery-people.yml
- type: Companies
  url: companies/agentic-resource-discovery-companies.yml
- type: Leads
  url: leads/agentic-resource-discovery-new-company-leads.yml
- type: Repositories
  url: repositories/agentic-resource-discovery-repositories.yml
- type: Releases
  url: releases/agentic-resource-discovery-releases.yml
- type: Contributors
  url: contributors/agentic-resource-discovery-contributors.yml
- type: WorkingGroups
  url: working-groups/agentic-resource-discovery-working-groups.yml
- type: Taxonomy
  url: taxonomy/agentic-resource-discovery-taxonomy.yml
- type: Glossary
  url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/glossary/
- type: FAQ
  url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/faq/
- type: GettingStarted
  url: https://agenticresourcediscovery.org/get_started/
- type: UsageTerms
  url: terms/agentic-resource-discovery-terms-of-service.yml
- type: DataLicense
  url: data-license/agentic-resource-discovery-data-license.yml

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) API — frequently asked questions

Does Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) have an API?

Yes. APIs.io lists 4 APIs from Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), including AI Catalog Manifest, Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Agents API and Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) Explore API, and 1 more.

Is there an OpenAPI specification for the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) API?

Yes. APIs.io indexes 3 OpenAPI specifications for Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), each linked for download from this page.

Is the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) API ready for AI agents?

Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) has a Kin Score of 27.6 out of 100 (thin) and an Agent Readiness score of 16.0 (agent-aware), scored by API Evangelist on 2026-11-13.

Work with this as data

Every provider here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

MCP server

One button, every client — Claude, Cursor, VS Code and the rest.

https://apis.io/mcp

Tools for providers

9 MCP tools reach this

find_providersBrowse and filter every provider in the catalog.
get_provider_artifactsEvery artifact this provider publishes, grouped by type.
get_provider_operationsEvery operation across all of their OpenAPIs — one call instead of parsing every spec.
get_provider_toolsEvery MCP tool they ship, with the operation each wraps.
get_provider_evidenceHow each part of their score was established. Free — the basis for a claim should not sit behind it.
get_provider_ratingPRO — composite, band, trend and facet scores.
apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.

All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page

This provider

curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/providers/agentic-resource-discovery"

All providers

curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/providers?limit=25"

Every operation they expose

curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/providers/agentic-resource-discovery/operations?limit=25"

How their score was established

curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/providers/agentic-resource-discovery/evidence"

Calls without X-API-Key need no key. Calls with it need a paid plan — get a key.

Get an API key

Free tier, no form to fill in. Signing in shares your email address with us — we store it to create your key and to recognise you if you sign in with another provider. See our Privacy Policy and Terms.

GitHub Google LinkedIn

A second provider on the same verified email joins the account you already have.