The open protocol for AI sharing
Where AI Graph tells an AI engine how toread a page, the Ask Protocol defines how a person hands a page to an AI engine with a portable, source-citing prompt. Publishers get it for free from the widget; third parties can implement it directly. This is its canonical home.
Cited Ask, Ask Targets, Ask Policy, Governance
Each layer has its own full reference doc. Together they define a deterministic, cacheable way to hand a page to an AI engine — never an LLM call on visitor interaction.
Cited Ask
The portable, source-citing prompt format — grammar, page-type templates, tone layer, and the mandatory citation tail.
Read the reference →02Ask Targets
The engine handoff registry — direct prefill vs. copy-to-clipboard, the field schema, and the canonical machine-readable registry.
Read the reference →03Ask Policy
The permission layer shared by AI Graph (read) and the Ask Protocol (share) — ai:allow, /ai.txt, and attribution.
Read the reference →04Governance
What's open, who stewards it, the license, versioning, discovery, and the neutral-values rule.
Read the reference →Discover a site's Ask support
Sites that implement the protocol advertise it with a/.well-known/ai-share.json file declaring their protocol version, policy, and supported engines. The canonical machine-readable engine registry lives at/protocol/targets.json.