# Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD)

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/agentic-resource-discovery/  
**Website:** https://agenticresourcediscovery.org  
**APIs profiled:** 2

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.

## Kin Score — 24.0 / 100 (emerging)

Scored 2026-08-25 under rubric 0.14.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 24.0).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 59.3 |
| Contract Quality | 47.6 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 28.9 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 11.9 |
| Commercial Clarity | 0.0 |
| Access Clarity | 0.0 |

## Agent readiness — 12.9 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | no |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |
| Delegated Identity | no |
| Protected Resource Metadata | no |
| Dynamic Client Registration | no |
| Agentic Commerce | no |

## APIs (2)

- **ARD Registry API** — The discovery interface a conformant Agent Registry exposes. POST /search is the only mandatory endpoint and takes a natural-language `text` query plus optional structured `filt...
- **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...

## 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

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/agentic-resource-discovery/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.