Back to Home11/18/2025, 2:22:55 AM

The first-ever protocol for websites and AI browsers to cooperate

pablooomvc
1 points
1 comments

Mood

supportive

Sentiment

positive

Category

tech

Key topics

AI

web development

protocol design

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.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

N/A

Peak period

2

Hour 1

Avg / period

1.3

Comment distribution4 data points

Based on 4 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    11/18/2025, 2:22:55 AM

    19h ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    11/18/2025, 2:22:55 AM

    0s after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    2 comments in Hour 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    11/18/2025, 5:17:07 AM

    16h ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (1 comments)
Showing 4 comments
cairnechou
18h ago
1 reply
This is a crucial conversation to start. As someone building in the AI/SaaS space, the current "HTML scraping" layer is the single most brittle and unreliable part of any agentic workflow. An agent breaks the moment a developer changes a CSS class.

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.

vinibrito
18h ago
1 reply
If I want AI to recommend my service or product I would gladly serve some JSON it can swallow.

No need for new protocol or anything like it, just a convention, as you mentioned, similar to robot.txt.

Perhaps aidata.json.

cairnechou
16h ago
You're totally right, "protocol" is way too heavy.

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.

pablooomvc
19h ago
AI browsers are on the rise, but there’s still no native way for them to actually talk to websites. Everything today is basically DOM parsing (which can be messy) and screenshots.

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!

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ID: 45960699Type: storyLast synced: 11/18/2025, 2:23:41 AM

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