The Agentic-Web Cheatsheet. An open, plain-language guide to the standards that let AI agents find, use, sign in to, shop on and pay websites. For each one: what it does, who's behind it, and how real it is today.
Agents are the new browsers. Since mid-2025 a dozen open standards have appeared to teach websites how to deal with them. They're young, they overlap, several are only drafts, and the press releases make all of them sound finished. ax.guide puts the whole map in one place, and keeps it honest: a standard is marked in production only when there is public evidence of real traffic.
Read it at ax.guide. Every page is a Markdown file in this repository, so anyone can fix a sentence or add a standard with a pull request.
Read it left to right as an agent's visit: find what's offered, use the site, prove who it is, shop, then pay. Orange means real traffic today, plain means early use, and hatched means a draft.
| # | Standard | Job | In one phrase |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | ARD Agentic Resource Discovery |
Find | Search for agent tools across the web |
| 02 | ai-catalog AI Catalog |
Find | A site's list of its AI offerings |
| 03 | WebMCP | Act | A page hands typed tools to the agent in your browser |
| 04 | NLWeb | Act | Ask a website questions in plain language |
| 05 | Web Bot Auth | Identity | Cryptographic ID for bots |
| 06 | Poppy Personal Agent Protocol (PAP) |
Identity | Your agent signs in to a company as you |
| 07 | auth.md | Identity | Your agent signs you up for a new service |
| 08 | UCP Universal Commerce Protocol |
Shop | A shared language for agent shopping |
| 09 | ACP Agentic Commerce Protocol |
Shop | Products (and checkout) into ChatGPT |
| 10 | AP2 Agent Payments Protocol |
Pay | Signed proof of what you authorized |
| 11 | MPP Machine Payments Protocol |
Pay | Pay inside a web request, card or crypto |
| 12 | x402 | Pay | Cents-per-request payments over HTTP 402 |
Each page has a one-line picture of the standard, a reality check, how it works, who's behind it, primary sources, the standards it's often confused with, and the date someone last checked it. The site also has a side-by-side comparison and a which-one-do-I-need guide.
 |
 |
These standards change every month, so the guide stays right only if people fix it. The most useful contributions, roughly in order:
- Correct a fact or a status. Open the standard's page, press Edit on GitHub, change the line and link your source.
- Re-verify a page. Check every claim against its sources and bump
last_verified. Pages unchecked for 90 days are marked as possibly out of date. - Add a standard. Copy
content/standards/_template.md, fill it in, and open a pull request.
Please read CONTRIBUTING.md first: it covers the status rules (a partner list is not adoption), sourcing and house style. Not sure about a change? Report an error or suggest a standard instead.
A small Next.js app with no backend, no database and no tracking. Every page is static, built from the files in content/.
content/
standards/<id>.md one file per standard: checked front matter + Markdown
standards/_template.md copy this to add a standard
jobs.json the five jobs, in map order
pairs.json the pairs people mix up (/compare)
guide.json which one do I need (/which)
home.json, site.json page text: titles, nav, footer, status labels
contribute.md the /contribute page
lib/schema.ts the rules every standard's front matter must follow
lib/standards.ts reads, checks and numbers the standards
app/ pages and share images (Next.js App Router)
components/ small presentational components
tests/ checks every content file and this README's table
The build and the tests check every content file: a missing field, an unknown status, a broken link between standards or an em dash fails CI and names the file.
You need Node 22 (see .nvmrc) and npm.
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:3000| Script | What it does |
|---|---|
npm run dev |
Development server |
npm run build |
Production build; fails if any content file is invalid |
npm test |
Content and unit tests |
npm run lint |
ESLint |
npm run typecheck |
TypeScript |
npm run readme |
Regenerate the table of standards in this README |
It runs on Vercel with no settings: import the repository and keep the defaults, and every pull request gets a preview. Canonical links and share images use the preview's own address on previews, then NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL (https://ax.guide in production), then Vercel's production address.
- Code: MIT.
- Words in
content/: CC BY 4.0. Reuse them anywhere, with credit. - Fonts: Archivo and JetBrains Mono, both under the SIL Open Font License; the share images use Archivo Black.
Maintained by Ora and contributors. Security issues: see SECURITY.md.