Colophon
About this site
An independent reference for the ARD specification, and a plain statement of who writes it and what they also run.
An independent reference for Agentic Resource Discovery, kept current as the specification changes. It is written by the people who run Neuronto, a public ARD registry, which is a conflict of interest and is stated on every page that carries a measurement. It is not affiliated with the ARD working group, and it is not ardregistry.org, which is a different project.
What this site is
A reference for the Agentic Resource Discovery specification, kept current as the specification moves, with measured data about what is actually published rather than what was announced.
It exists because of a gap that is easy to verify. The official specification site is about
13,000 words across 20 pages. Everything else on the first page of search results for ARD terms is
an announcement post from June 2026, and every one of them still says the manifest is called
ai-catalog.json, which stopped being true in August. Announcements are dated news and
nobody goes back to fix them. A reference is supposed to be corrected.
Who runs it, and the conflict of interest
The same people who run Neuronto, a public ARD registry. That is a conflict and it is stated here rather than buried, because this site publishes comparisons in which Neuronto appears.
How that is handled:
- Every measurement says how it was taken and when. The method for the adoption figures is written out on State of ARD, and the raw counts are served as JSON so you can check them.
- The registry comparison probes every registry the same way, with the script published, and reports results that are unflattering to us as well as to others.
- Where the data comes from one index rather than the whole web, the page says so. Nobody has a complete view of this ecosystem, including us.
A name collision worth being clear about. ardregistry.net is not ardregistry.org. That is a separate project, describing itself as the first public neutral registry for the ARD specification, and it is one of the upstreams Neuronto federates. This site is a reference, not a registry, and does not index anyone.
How the content is made
Prose is written by hand and checked against the specification text before publishing. Numbers come from a live index through one code path, cached to disk, so a page can never quietly invent a figure when a fetch fails. Every page carries the date it was last reviewed and the specification version it was checked against.
Where this site quotes the specification, the quote is marked as a quotation and linked to the section it came from. One editorial change is applied throughout: where the source uses an em dash, we render a comma, because this site does not use them. It never changes the sense, and it is the only alteration made. Where the writing goes beyond the specification rather than quoting it, it says so, because the two carry very different weight.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it is worth fixing and we would rather hear it. Issues with the specification itself belong with the working group at github.com/ards-project/docs; this site cannot change the spec and does not speak for it.
What this site does not do
- It does not index or rank anyone. It is documentation.
- It sets no cookies, runs no analytics script, and makes no third-party request. The only external resource on any page is the font stylesheet.
- The server does count requests, because otherwise nobody would know whether any of this is read. It records the path, the response code, a one-word category for the client, the referring host and the country from the CDN header. It does not store an IP address, not hashed and not truncated, sets nothing in your browser, and has no way to follow one reader between pages. Counts are kept for four months and then deleted.
- It does not accept payment for placement, and there is nothing here to place.
Licensing
The ARD specification is published by the working group under Apache 2.0 at agenticresourcediscovery.org. The writing on this site is ours. Quotations from the specification are reproduced under its licence, attributed and linked.
Last reviewed 2026-09-04. Checked against ARD v0.91 (Proposal, 2026-08-26).