Mirror
What is a Mirror?
A Mirror is the structured, machine-readable surface that an AIEP-compliant publisher hosts at a known path on their domain: /.well-known/aiep/
It is called a Mirror because it reflects the publisher’s verified knowledge — certificates, compliance records, schemas, artefacts — in a form that AI systems and automated agents can retrieve directly, without scraping, interpreting, or guessing.
A Mirror is not a copy of your website. It is a parallel, structured layer that sits alongside your human-readable content and answers the question: what does this organisation officially publish, in a form a machine can verify?
What a Mirror contains
At minimum, a conformant Mirror contains two files:
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
index.json | Lists all published artefacts with paths, types, and hashes |
metadata.json | Declares publisher identity and protocol version |
Beyond that, a Mirror can contain any AIEP artefact type: certificates, audit events, compliance records, schemas, ledger entries, and downloads.
How a Mirror is discovered
AI systems and automated agents discover your Mirror by querying GET /.well-known/aiep/index.json — the single entry point. Everything else is linked from the index. No registration is required to publish a Mirror — the path convention is the discovery mechanism.
Mirror vs website
| Website | Mirror | |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Humans | Machines + humans |
| Format | HTML | JSON (schema-conformant) |
| Verifiable | No | Yes (hash + schema) |
| Discoverable by AI | By crawl/guess | By convention (/.well-known/aiep/) |
| Requires interpretation | Yes | No |
Next steps
See: Mirror: Implement · AI Retrieval · Quickstart · Validator
AIEP Mirror is the publication pattern that allows the open web to become machine-readable and verifiable.
A Mirror node publishes a machine interface at:
/.well-known/aiep/
This enables AI systems and tools to discover:
- what the publisher provides
- how to validate it
- where the artefacts are stored
Why Mirror matters
Large AI models don’t need to get endlessly bigger if knowledge can be retrieved reliably from sources.
Mirror enables:
- current information retrieval from source
- provenance-aware referencing
- evidence-backed knowledge exchange
What this Hub demonstrates
This Hub is itself a Mirror-style node:
- it exposes the AIEP well-known interface
- it publishes schemas and canon rules
- it publishes the innovation ledger
Use this Hub as an exemplar for your own site.
Validate your implementation: /validator
Mirror in detail
Quickstart — implement a Mirror in five steps
The minimum viable Mirror requires no backend. Add five files to any existing web server:
/.well-known/aiep/index.json # Discovery endpoint
/.well-known/aiep/metadata.json # Publisher identity and capabilities
/.well-known/aiep/version.json # Protocol version declaration
/.well-known/aiep/canon/self-test-vectors.json # Canon hash self-test
/robots.txt (add AIEP-Mirror: allow)
Schema definitions and validation tooling: Downloads → aiep-well-known and aiep-hub-validator.
A working reference implementation is available at /.well-known/aiep/ on this hub.
Adoption
Who adopts a Mirror, how, and in what order. The canonical adoption sequence — from discovery files to certified publisher — for organisations publishing under AIEP.
Implementation
The full technical implementation guide. Directory structure, required files, schema conformance, hash computation, and endpoint validation with aiep-hub-validator and aiep-well-known.
Federation
How Mirror nodes interoperate. Federation allows a distributed network of mirrors to cross-reference and validate each other’s artefacts — without a central trust authority.
See also: AI Integration · Architecture · Get Started