Governance

Open, stewarded, stable

The Ask AI Protocol is an open specification. Anyone may implement it, and implementing it never requires an AskThis product or account. AskThis publishes and stewards the protocol — it maintains the registry and the version history in the open, under the rules below.

What’s open

These are free to implement, with no permission, fee, or registration:

• The specification — the four layers (Cited Ask, Ask Targets, Ask Policy, Governance) and the Cited Ask format.
• The Ask Targets registry — /protocol/targets.json.
• The discovery formats — /.well-known/ai-share.json, ai:* meta tags, and /ai.txt.

The AskThis widget is one implementation of the protocol, not a prerequisite for it. Publishers get the protocol for free from the widget; third parties can implement it directly against these documents.

Who stewards it

AskThis maintains the registry and versioning today, in the open, and commits to:

• an open contribution process — see Contribute;
• backward-compatible additions only within a major version; and
• announcing changes in the Changelog.

This is a benevolent-steward model: a single maintainer keeping the spec coherent, not a claim of multi-vendor neutrality. As adoption grows, governance can widen — but the openness guarantees above do not depend on that.

License

• The specification text is published under CC-BY-4.0 — use it, quote it, build on it, with attribution.
• The registry data and JSON Schema are released into the public domain (CC0) so any implementer can copy them freely without attribution overhead.

Stability guarantees

Within a major version, these are stable identifiers you can hardcode against:

• ai:* meta-tag names and the ai:type values;
• Ask Target ids and their method (direct / copy).

Anything removed or renamed is deprecated with notice in the Changelog first — never silently dropped within a major version.

Versioned

The spec is at v1.0. Its canonical home is askthis.dev/protocol. Changes within a major version are backward-compatible additions only; a breaking change requires a new major version and a migration note.

Discovery

A site advertises Ask Protocol support by publishing a /.well-known/ai-share.json file declaring its protocol version, policy, and supported engines:

{
  "protocol": "ask-ai",
  "version": "1.0",
  "policy": {
    "summarize": true,
    "cite": true,
    "compare": true,
    "attribution": "AudioTech Official Store"
  },
  "targets": ["chatgpt", "gemini", "copilot", "claude", "perplexity"],
  "citedAsk": true
}

Neutral, factual values

The registry and policy fields are neutral and factual — not marketing copy. No target label, URL, or policy field should carry a claim an engine might echo as fact. This rule is inherited from AI Graph governance.

Roadmap (v1.x) — not yet implemented

• Validation — per-layer JSON-Schema validators (Cited Ask grammar, target registry, ai.txt/ai:allow), surfaced through the AI Discoverability Score.
• Version negotiation — implementers reading version from ai-share.json and fetching the matching registry from askthis.dev/protocol/targets.json.

To propose a new engine or a spec change today, see Contribute.

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Layers: Cited Ask · Ask Targets · Ask Policy · Governance Meta: Contribute · Changelog