Deployment Options

The baseline requirement for implementing AMES is a defined set of tags placed in the <head> of an HTML page.

How you expand upon that baseline depends on your objectives for automated access and use.

1. Policy-Signaling Baseline

A publisher may use AMES solely to communicate permissions or direct automated systems to an existing policy, rights statement, or licensing framework. No Agent Exchange file is required. A copy-ready deployment at this posture is in the Permissions-Only Deployment example.

Declare the applicable policy through a <meta name="ames-policy"> tag and link to the AMES specification using a <link rel="automated-usage"> tag. You may use either the native AMES permissions framework or a custom notice.

Example A: AMES Native Permissions

Using the native four-position tuple (index/ephemeral/store/train):

<link rel="automated-usage" href="https://openames.org/v0.9" />
<meta
  name="ames-policy"
  content="1/1/0/0"
  data-positions="index/ephemeral/store/train"
/>

Example B: Custom Permissions

Directing automated systems to an existing policy, rights statement, or licensing framework:

<link rel="automated-usage" href="https://openames.org/v0.9" />
<meta
  name="ames-policy"
  content="custom"
  data-notice="https://example.com/terms"
/>

Important: AMES permissions do not replace robots.txt. The two mechanisms operate at different layers:

robots.txt governs crawler access: whether a crawler is permitted to retrieve the page.
AMES governs automated use: what a system may do with the content after obtaining access.

Publishers seeking a defensive posture should generally use both.

2. Translation Baseline

A publisher that chooses to provide a machine-readable translation of a page must implement the HTML source tags above and publish an Agent Exchange (.ax) document.

For each translated page, you must:

Place the required AMES policy and usage tags in the HTML <head>.
Add a <link rel="alternate"> tag pointing to the absolute URL of the exchange document:

<link
  rel="alternate"
  type="text/markdown"
  href="https://example.com/page.ax.md"
/>

Publish the .ax.md exchange document at the declared URL.
Include both a valid manifest and a structurally faithful translation of the page body.

Publishing an Agent Exchange document does not require the publisher to permit every automated use. Permissions may still allow or restrict search indexing, ephemeral retrieval, persistent storage, and model training independently.

A publisher may provide translation files for all pages, selected pages, or only particular classes of content. The appropriate scope may vary across the same site.

A complete translated page at this posture is in the Semantic Markup example.

The following sections explain how to compose the manifest and translate the page body.