If search was an index for people, ARD is an index for AI agents. The Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification, published by Google on June 17, 2026, is an open standard that lets agents find and verify the capabilities they need across the web. Microsoft, GitHub, Nvidia, Hugging Face, and 11 companies in total built it, and released it under the Apache 2.0 license. It signals that the one doing the discovering is shifting from people to agents. ASAP summarizes how this standard changes content discovery, from the primary announcement.

From human search to agentic discovery

ARD is a standard designed for AI agents, not people, to find web resources. Google published ARD on June 17, 2026, letting an agent ask at runtime where a capability lives, which one to use, and whether it is safe to connect to. If search was an index for people, ARD is an index for agents.

ai-catalog.json: a sitemap for agents

ARD works through two primitives. A site hosts an ai-catalog.json manifest at a well-known path on its domain, and a registry API crawls and indexes these catalogs and returns ranked matches to natural-language queries. If robots.txt and sitemap were for search engines, ai-catalog.json is a sitemap for agents.

Eleven big-tech firms pushed it together

ARD is backed by 11 companies as launch contributors, not Google alone, spanning clouds, chipmakers, and dev platforms. Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, GoDaddy, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, Nvidia, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake all signed on. GitHub shipped a reference implementation the same day.

Released as an open standard

ARD is an open standard published under the Apache 2.0 license. It builds on the data model from the Linux Foundation's AI Catalog Working Group. Because it is a shared spec that no single company owns, it does not lock anyone into one closed ecosystem.

What it means: discovery shifts from people to agents

ARD shows that the one doing the finding on the web is shifting from people to agents. Content has been optimized for people to click, but now it must be optimized for agents to query and select. Being discovered and cited by AI is becoming the new gateway to traffic.

Wrap-up

ARD is an open standard for AI agents to find web resources on their own. The ai-catalog.json manifest, participation from 11 big-tech firms, and the Apache 2.0 release are its core. As discovery shifts to agents, preparing content to be read by AI matters more than ever.

Source: ASAP summary of Google's Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification release (June 17, 2026; Apache 2.0 license, ai-catalog.json manifest plus a registry API, 11 contributors including Cisco, GitHub, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Hugging Face, with a GitHub reference implementation the same day).