ard-publish

Make your API, MCP server or AI agent discoverable by AI agents.

Build, validate and verify an Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) manifest — the /.well-known/ard.json file that lets AI agents find what you offer at runtime, without anyone installing your tool in advance.

pip install ard-publish

How do I make my API discoverable by AI agents?

Serve an ARD manifest on your own domain describing what you offer, with 2 to 5 representative queries per entry. Registries crawl it. There is no submission form, no marketplace to apply to and no allowlist.

from ard_publish import Manifest, Entry

m = Manifest(host="example.com", display_name="Example Inc")
m.add(Entry.mcp_server(
    name="weather",
    display_name="Weather API",
    host="example.com",
    url="https://example.com/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json",
    description="Current conditions and forecasts for any location.",
    queries=["what is the weather in Berlin",
             "will it rain in London tomorrow"],
))
m.save(".well-known/ard.json")     # raises if it would not be findable

What is ARD?

ARD stands for Agentic Resource Discovery: an open specification for how AI agents find the tools, skills, agents and APIs they need, published in June 2026 by a working group including Google, Microsoft, Hugging Face, AWS, Cisco, GitHub, Nvidia, Salesforce and Snowflake.

It answers one question — "what is available for this task?" — then gets out of the way. It is a discovery layer, not a runtime, and it does not replace MCP or A2A.

Why this package exists

Publishing a manifest is a small job that is easy to get subtly wrong, and the failures are silent. A malformed URN, or entries with no representative queries, validates as JSON, serves a 200, and is never returned by any search. There is no error to notice.

save() refuses to write a manifest that would not be findable.

Command line

ard-publish init example.com > .well-known/ard.json   # scaffold a valid manifest
ard-publish validate .well-known/ard.json             # check it locally
ard-publish check example.com                         # check it for real

check is the one that matters. It fetches your live manifest, validates it, and asks every public ARD registry whether they return your domain for your own representative queries — because publishing and being indexed are different things.

example.com  grade B  82/100

   15/15   Serves a manifest                found
   10/10   Advertised on all four paths     4 of 4
   25/25   Conformance                      0 errors, 0 warnings
   20/20   Entries are searchable           3 of 3 carry representativeQueries
   12/30   Returned by registries           2 of 5 return this domain

  registries returning you:
    yes  Neuronto
     no  GitHub Agent Finder
    yes  WellKnown

How do I publish my MCP server so agents can find it?

Three steps, about ten minutes.

1. Write the manifest — ard-publish init yourdomain.com

2. Advertise it on all four discovery paths. Serving only one makes you invisible to any client that checks another:

/.well-known/ard.json          the path a consumer MUST fetch
Agentmap: <url>                in robots.txt, the agent-facing Sitemap:
<link rel="ard" href="...">    in your page head
DNS service records            optional

Manifest.robots_line() and .link_tags() generate two of those for you.

3. Verify — ard-publish check yourdomain.com

The mistake that costs you everything

Leaving out representativeQueries. It is the field registries build their semantic index from, so an entry without it is a valid catalogue entry that no search will ever return.

Write 2 to 5 per entry, phrased as the request someone would actually make:

Media types

Three spellings for MCP servers are in circulation, and because filters match exactly, the wrong one gets you silently dropped by registries that do not normalise. Entry.mcp_server() uses application/mcp-server-card+json, the spelling the official conformance tool accepts.

Helpers are provided for each resource kind:

API

Links

• Agentic Resource Discovery specification
• Publishing guide
• Free ARD audit — which registries return you
• Neuronto, the federated ARD index
• Source

Licence

Apache-2.0