Agentic Branded Content

A spec for publishers to serve AI agents sponsored branded content matched to the page — and get paid for bot traffic.

Spec v0.1 · 2026-06-10

Early public draft. The format is usable today and open to feedback; details may change before v1.0.

The problem

AI agents (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot…) read publisher pages to answer user questions. The publisher serves its content and gets nothing back.

Agentic Branded Content (ABC) adds a paid layer on top. For AI-agent requests only, the publisher serves a compact brand card: sponsored branded content matched to the page's topic — a skincare brand on a beauty article, a carmaker on an auto review. Humans see the page unchanged. The publisher gets paid for the bot visit; the agent gets relevant, structured context.

ABC is additive: it neither blocks nor licenses a publisher's own content — the agent still reads the page. It sits alongside access and content-licensing standards, not in place of them.

How it works

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    participant V as Visitor
    participant E as Publisher edge
    participant P as Provider
    V->>E: request page
    Note over E: classify by User-Agent
    alt AI agent
        E->>P: card request
        P-->>E: 200 · card
        E-->>V: page + card
    else human
        E-->>V: page unchanged
    end

The publisher's edge classifies each request by its User-Agent; only AI-agent traffic reaches the provider:

A visitor — human or AI agent — requests a page.
The edge classifies it by User-Agent. For an AI agent, it requests a card from the provider's fragment endpoint.
The provider returns a card (200); 204 means no brand is eligible (no-fill).
The edge inlines the card and serves page + card to the agent.
A human is served the page unchanged — the provider is never called.

The card

The core of ABC is the brand card — the content an agent reads. A provider exposes a fragment endpoint (the channel) that returns a card for a given page; the publisher's edge classifies the request and, for AI-agent traffic only, requests the card and inlines it on its existing CDN — a single <esi:include> tag (Akamai, Fastly, Varnish), or a small edge function (Cloudflare Worker, Lambda@Edge). No platform lock-in. Copy-paste integration for each CDN is in the Integration guide.

A card is a single self-contained <article role="complementary"> — a brand label, a short factual summary, a bullet block built for LLM ingestion, and source links. ~2 KB, under 1 000 tokens, designed to fit an agent's context window. It carries its own inline styling so it renders without the host stylesheet. See the full card schema.

<article class="abc-card" role="complementary">
  <div>Brand · Renault</div>
  <div>Nouvelle Clio E-Tech full hybrid — 160 hp, up to 1,000 km range</div>
  <p>Renault renews its flagship city car with a 160 hp full-hybrid E-Tech
     powertrain, no plug-in needed. Up to 1,000 km on one tank…</p>
  <pre>• Brand: Renault
• Source: renault.fr
• Date: 2026-04-15
• Event: Launch of the Clio E-Tech full hybrid
• Relevance: most accessible hybrid city car in its segment
• Keywords: Clio, E-Tech, full hybrid, city car</pre>
  <div>Source: <a href="…">Nouvelle Clio E-Tech</a> · <a href="…">newsroom</a></div>
</article>

The fragment endpoint

A provider exposes a fragment endpoint — the URL the publisher's edge calls to get a card. The edge calls it only for AI-agent traffic, so it is an HTTP GET that receives the page context — at minimum the page URL — and returns:

Status	When	Body
`200`	a brand is eligible for the page	the card (`text/html`)
`204`	no eligible brand (no-fill)	empty

Because every request that reaches the endpoint is already an agent, the response depends only on the page and context — it is cacheable by URL, with no Vary: User-Agent. The visitor's User-Agent may be forwarded for the provider's reporting (bot family / purpose), but it does not change the card and is not part of the cache key. The exact request parameters and selection logic are provider-defined; only this behavior is part of the spec. Machine-readable contract: fragment.openapi.yaml.

The provider

A provider is the service a publisher authorizes to supply branded content for its AI-agent traffic. A provider:

runs the fragment endpoint and decides which brand is relevant to the page;
renders the card and keeps it within the token budget;
manages the brand relationships and the reporting behind it.

The spec is provider-neutral: any service implementing a compatible fragment endpoint is a provider. A publisher authorizes its providers in abc.txt (next).

The declaration — `abc.txt`

Once a site serves cards, it can declare participation publicly with a small file at the site root, /abc.txt. It lists which providers are authorized to supply branded content for AI agents on that site — the same transparency model as ads.txt, applied to the agentic web.

# abc.txt - Agentic Branded Content
# Declares which providers may serve AI-agent branded content on this site.
# Spec: https://brandedcontent.dev

# provider_domain, account_id, relationship
shftd2.com, p1, RESELLER

The file is optional — cards are delivered without it.

Each line is provider_domain, account_id, relationship — DIRECT if the publisher controls the account, RESELLER if the provider resells on its behalf. The file is text/plain, ASCII; # starts a comment. The account_id is the publisher's account at that provider, so the same provider can appear on more than one line (a DIRECT and a RESELLER line). A parser ignores fields it doesn't recognise, so the format can grow.

ABC is an open spec. Anyone may implement abc.txt and a compatible fragment endpoint; reference implementations are open-source.