AI agents are getting their own search engine

Major tech firms including Google, Microsoft, GoDaddy, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks, Snowflake, GitHub and Cisco have announced Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), an open specification for publishing, discovering and verifying AI capabilities across the web.

Notably, OpenAI and Anthropic are not listed among the participating partners. ARD aims to close a discovery gap that limits agentic AI. Building on earlier work such as the Model Context Protocol, ARD is conceived as an app-store–style layer so agents can find tools, skills and other agents across teams and platforms.

Its architecture relies on catalogs (hosted ai-catalog.json files) and registries that crawl, index and return matched capabilities with metadata to verify publishers. The specification anchors identity and trust to domain ownership and models its hierarchy on DNS.

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