--- type: WebPage name: It takes two to transact. id: "https://selfe.ai/agentic-commerce/a2a-discovery" url: "https://selfe.ai/agentic-commerce/a2a-discovery" publisher: "did:web:selfe.ai" description: "How Selfe gives compatible AI agents a known, authenticated route to your business, with the actions and terms you allow and no one-off integration." --- # It takes two to transact. > How Selfe gives compatible AI agents a known, authenticated route to your business, with the actions and terms you allow and no one-off integration. Your Selfe gives a compatible agent a known, authenticated way to make a request. It publishes the actions and terms you allow, with no one-off integration. Selfe lets your business and the agent it's talking to identify each other properly before anything is agreed. ## A known address for an unknown agent. An outside agent does not arrange an account or wait for your team. It needs to check the terms, make a request and move on. If it cannot, it chooses somebody it can. Selfe gives every compatible agent the same bounded route in. It verifies the caller, exposes only the actions you permit and answers from your current terms. Your team does not approve every new connection. The rule is published once and applies whenever an agent arrives. ## What an agent needs before it asks. **An agent card.** Your business, address and permitted actions, in a standard place. **A signed identity.** Proof that the Selfe answering is yours. **Tools it can call.** Only actions you allow are exposed. **Your terms, up front.** Limits and information requirements before it asks. **No integration to write.** A standard route, not a supplier project. **Agents you have never met.** The same route works without a prior account or conversation. **Derwentwater Launch Company** The Keswick Launch boat trips on Derwentwater, now readable by an agent in real time, live pricing via FareHarbor, through Visit Keswick. **Cranstons Cumbrian Food Hall** A Cumbrian food hall and deli, connecting through its own WooCommerce shop, via Visit Keswick. ## A second front door, without changing the first. Selfe adds an agent card and governed endpoints to your domain. Your human site and the systems behind it stay as they are. Agents get a structured route; people get the website they already know. You add reach without running a second sales channel. ## Worth reading next The latest on how AI agents actually work, written as it happens. **The request behind your booking button is what matters.** A booking button helps a person start a journey. An agent needs to establish the terms of a specific request, know what it may do and carry the relevant context into the next step. **Someone asks for a dog-friendly stay in October. What happens next?** A dog-friendly stay in October sounds like a simple filter until an AI agent tries to act on it. What happens next depends on details a first-pass search never asks for. **How much does an agent need to know before it can buy?** Not everything. An AI agent working through a booking request doesn't need a business's full history, it needs the small number of facts that resolve the specific thing the person asked for. A page with forty things to say and none of them the right one loses to a page with three. ## Do we need to build our own AI agent? No. Your Selfe is the business-side agent: it publishes your identity, permitted actions and terms. You set its boundaries; Selfe maintains the protocols. **What is an outside agent allowed to access?** Only the facts and actions your Selfe publishes for that purpose. Your playbook controls what may be answered, quoted, held, booked or paid without asking you. The systems behind Selfe are not handed over to an outside agent, and a request beyond the permitted action is refused or escalated. **What do the credentials actually prove?** They show who issued a claim, who is making a request and what authority the agent carries. They make those things verifiable; they do not make an unsupported claim true. **What stops something hammering our systems?** Requests reach Selfe through Cloudflare and are checked before anything is allowed near a booking or commerce system. Rate limits, identity checks and action permissions separate ordinary discovery from something attempting to transact. Your operational systems see only the requests that pass those controls. **Can an AI agent really complete a sale or booking?** Yes, where your connected systems and rules allow it. Selfe checks live availability and terms, takes authorised payment through your existing provider, and writes the order or booking into the system your team already uses. Anything outside your rules stops before it commits. ## Act on this - [Check whether an agent can buy from you](https://selfe.ai/agentic-commerce/buyability-check) — the free readiness scan. - [Discover venues](https://selfe.ai/api/registry/discover) — `POST`, semantic browse across the registry. - [Match a bookable answer](https://selfe.ai/api/registry/match) — `POST` with dates and party size. - [Verify Selfe's identity](https://selfe.ai/.well-known/did.json) — `did:web:selfe.ai`. - [Agent card](https://selfe.ai/.well-known/agent-card.json) — how to connect over A2A or MCP.