What is ARD?
Agentic Resource Discovery, Selfe's own standard for how an AI agent finds a business's Echo in the first place, complementary to UCP rather than competing with it.
2 min read
Connection protocols like MCP assume an agent already knows where to look. ARD is the layer before that: how a business's structured facts surface to an agent that hasn't been pointed at them directly, the discovery half of the job UCP's checkout half depends on. Selfe built it because that discovery layer needed a real answer, not because an existing one wasn't already doing the job.
Good for
Getting a business's Echo discovered by an agent that's never been pointed at it directly.
Not good for
Any of the steps after discovery, connecting, identifying or paying are separate layers.
What is an Echo?
Selfe's structured representation of a business, the specific, verified facts an AI agent checks, kept separate from the website copy written for a browsing person.
What is MCP?
Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets an AI agent call into a business's own systems, checking live data or triggering a defined action, the way it would check availability or pull a menu.
What is UCP?
Universal Commerce Protocol, the checkout protocol that completes a purchase once an AI agent has already been connected, identified and authorised, handing a business back a confirmed order instead of an unverified promise.