The `.well-known/aiep/` Standard

The web was built for human ingestion. AI agents are the new primary discovery mechanism. .well-known/aiep/ is the infrastructure layer that makes AIEP-compliant knowledge findable by both.

What it is

.well-known/ is an IETF standard (RFC 8615) for well-known URIs — a canonical location where services declare structured information about themselves. HTTPS certificates use it. OAuth uses it. DNS over HTTPS uses it.

AIEP extends this pattern with a machine-readable manifest at /.well-known/aiep/index.json.

Any domain that hosts AIEP-compliant knowledge declares itself at that path. Any AI agent, crawler, or automated system can retrieve it without scraping, interpretation, or human involvement. The manifest declares: this domain runs AIEP, this is the protocol version, this is how to verify the evidence trail, this content carries a proof standard.

Live example — this domain →

Why it matters more than any other feature

The founding thesis of AIEP is the rejuvenation of the web — giving knowledge the integrity layer it always deserved. That integrity needs to be:

Provable — not asserted, but verifiable by any recipient
Machine-readable — not just for humans, but for AI agents acting on behalf of humans
Discoverable without permission — no API key, no registration, no intermediary

The .well-known/aiep/ manifest satisfies all three.

When an AI agent evaluates a piece of content hosted on an AIEP-compliant domain, it can retrieve the manifest and determine:

This domain runs AIEP
The protocol version and schema version
Where to find the evidence registry, certificates, and audit records
Whether the content meets the evidence standard before acting on it

This is the infrastructure of the rejuvenated web. Not the Hub. Not the chat interface. Not the token counter. The manifest is the actual protocol layer — the thing that makes AIEP machine-discoverable at scale, without human instruction.

The padlock in a browser address bar tells a human that a connection is encrypted. The .well-known/aiep/ manifest tells an AI agent that knowledge on this domain carries its proof.

The manifest structure

The index document at /.well-known/aiep/index.json declares the domain’s AIEP identity and links to all subsidiary endpoints:

{
  "protocol": "AIEP",
  "version": "2.0.0",
  "schema_version": "2.0.0",
  "domain": "aiep.dev",
  "registry": "/.well-known/aiep/registry/index.json",
  "certificates": "/.well-known/aiep/certificates/index.json",
  "audit": "/.well-known/aiep/audit/index.json",
  "compliance": "/.well-known/aiep/compliance/policy.json",
  "sdk": "https://pypi.org/project/aiep-genome-sdk/",
  "adopters": "https://aiep.dev/adopters"
}

The full endpoint list — schemas, citation records, protocol text, compliance signals — is available at the Machine Interface page.

What AI agents can do with it

Any AI agent that retrieves /.well-known/aiep/index.json before acting on content from a domain can:

Action	What it enables
Schema version check	Confirm the content schema matches what the agent expects
Certificate lookup	Verify that specific content artefacts have valid `CertificateHash` records
Audit record retrieval	Retrieve the full evidence trail for any reasoning session
Compliance status check	Confirm the domain operates within declared governance bounds
Negative Proof lookup	Confirm what evidence was searched for and not found — not just what was found

This is the difference between an AI agent that retrieves content and assumes it is accurate, and one that retrieves content and verifies it is proven.

How to implement it

To make your domain AIEP-discoverable:

Expose the manifest — create /.well-known/aiep/index.json at your root domain. The minimum viable manifest declares protocol, version, schema_version, and domain.
Validate the manifest — use aiep-hub-validator to confirm your manifest conforms to AIEP Mirror v2.0.0.
Publish evidence artefacts — use the GENOME-SDK to produce hash-verified artefacts that the manifest can point to.
Register — submit a pull request to the AIEP Registry to appear as a verified AIEP-compliant publisher.

Reference implementation: aiep-well-known — the generator that produces the manifest files for this domain, with full schema validation and version management.

The PIEA implementation

Piea’s most recent infrastructure update added .well-known/aiep/ AI Mirror artefacts for crawler discovery. This means:

Any AI agent that discovers Piea’s domain can retrieve its manifest
The manifest confirms Piea is AIEP-compliant and points to its evidence registry
AI agents can retrieve evidence-qualified responses from Piea endpoints and verify their provenance cryptographically

This is the protocol in production. Not a demonstration. Not a planned feature. A live deployment of the machine-discovery layer.

The long-term significance

AI agents are becoming the primary discovery, retrieval, and synthesis layer of the web. The question that defines the next decade of knowledge infrastructure is this:

When an AI agent retrieves a piece of content from the web and acts on it — on behalf of a doctor, a lawyer, a business, a regulator — how does it know whether what it retrieved is proven or merely claimed?

The .well-known/aiep/ standard is the answer to that question at the infrastructure level. Not a product. Not a service. A standard that any domain can adopt, that any AI agent can query, that any recipient can verify — without permission, without authority, without intermediary.

It is, in the most literal sense, the web’s integrity layer.

Machine Interface — full endpoint list →
GENOME-SDK — build AIEP-compliant artefacts →
Protocol Architecture →
Founding Statement →

The .well-known/aiep/ Standard