Skip to content
AMES

Overview

AMES is a specification for communicating content and permissions to automated systems.

It defines two complementary capabilities: a native machine-readable permissions vocabulary describing how automated systems may use published content, and a structured exchange document that translates human-facing web pages into a form designed for machine readers while preserving meaning, context, and attribution.

Traditional web publishing was designed for browsers and human readers. Automated systems today typically consume either the original HTML, which carries substantial presentation, scripting, and browser-oriented machinery, or extracted text and Markdown representations that flatten page structure and discard important contextual signals.

AMES provides a structured alternative. Rather than reducing a page to isolated text, an AMES exchange document represents it as a published object, preserving meaningful content boundaries, page identity, attribution, and other contextual information while removing browser-specific complexity that machine readers do not require.

The specification also provides a native permissions framework for automated use. Publishers can express whether content may be indexed, retrieved to answer individual requests, retained for persistent reuse, or used for model development. Publishers who already maintain their own licensing or rights framework may instead point to that policy through AMES using a consistent, machine-readable declaration.

The two capabilities are designed to work together. The exchange document tells automated systems what a page contains; the permissions declaration tells them how the publisher intends that content to be used.

AMES defines

Section titled “AMES defines”
  • A native machine-readable permissions vocabulary covering search indexing, ephemeral retrieval, persistent storage, and model development, with support for publisher-defined custom permissions.
  • An Agent Exchange document with a defined Markdown serialization (.ax.md), with JSON reserved for future specification.
  • A site-level declaration file located by convention at /.well-known/ames-ai.txt.
  • A defined manifest structure for declaring page identity, permissions, content regions, visual context, and related metadata.
  • Standardized discovery and processing conventions for publishers and consuming systems.