The First-Ever Protocol for Websites and AI Browsers to Cooperate
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The author introduces Astral, a protocol for websites and AI browsers to cooperate, allowing websites to expose tools and metadata to AI browsers, and the community is supportive of this innovation.
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A common protocol—like a robots.txt but for AI agents—feels like the inevitable and necessary next step. We need a way for sites to "semantically" declare their functions and content to a machine.
This raises a huge game-theory question, though: What is the website's incentive to adopt this?
It's a "cooperate or defect" dilemma. If a site doesn't cooperate, the AI agent will just scrape it (badly). If it does cooperate, it makes it easier for the AI agent to summarize its content and potentially bypass its ad/conversion funnels.
I'm curious what the authors think the "win-win" is here for the websites themselves.
No need for new protocol or anything like it, just a convention, as you mentioned, similar to robot.txt.
Perhaps aidata.json.
A simple convention like aidata.json is perfect. That's the "win-win" I was looking for: the site gets to clearly offer what it wants the AI to see, and the AI gets clean data instead of having to guess at brittle HTML.
aidata.json is a great name for it.
So I built Astral, a tiny protocol that lets:
- websites expose tools, context, and metadata - AI browsers discover and use those tools. All execution happens on the website, under its own rules and constraints
I’m still in early stages and looking to work 1-1 with a few devs to build real use cases and integrate Astral into their projects.
Here you can find demos + details: https://astral.cleobrowser.com
Would love your thoughts!