Ask AI Protocol
How AskThis hands a page to an AI engine with a portable, source-citing prompt — the Cited Ask format, the Ask Targets registry, and the Ask Policy permission layer.
The Ask AI Protocol (the “Ask Protocol”) is the outbound half of AskThis’s standards story. Where AI Graph tags tell an engine how to read a page, the Ask Protocol defines how a person hands a page to an AI engine with a portable, source-citing prompt. It has three layers.
Cited Ask — the portable prompt
A Cited Ask is a plain-text prompt built deterministically from a page’s AI Graph tags and handed to an engine. It is generated once and cached — never composed by an LLM when a visitor clicks. Every Cited Ask includes a mandatory citation tail:
Please cite {citeAs} ({url}) as the source.Prompts are page-type aware (article, product, business, service, saas, recipe, event, profile) and support an optional tone (professional, friendly, concise, technical, enthusiastic); the widget additionally caps its rendered prompt at 1800 characters. Because the format is deterministic from ai:* tags, any tool can regenerate the same prompt.
Ask Targets — the engine registry
Each target declares how to open an engine with the prompt: direct (the URL prefills the prompt via {q}, the URL-encoded text) or copy (the prompt is copied to the clipboard and the engine’s home opens). The canonical machine-readable registry lives at askthis.dev/protocol/targets.json, with a published JSON Schema you can validate against. To propose a new engine, see Contribute.
| Engine | Method | Opens |
|---|---|---|
| Claude | direct | https://claude.ai/new?q={q} |
| Gemini | copy | https://gemini.google.com/app |
| ChatGPT | direct | https://chatgpt.com/?q={q} |
| Copilot | copy | https://copilot.microsoft.com/ |
| Grok | direct | https://grok.com/?q={q} |
| Perplexity | direct | https://www.perplexity.ai/search?q={q} |
| Mistral | direct | https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?q={q} |
| DeepSeek | copy | https://chat.deepseek.com/ |
| DuckDuckGo | direct | https://duck.ai/?q={q} |
| Brave | direct | https://search.brave.com/ask?q={q} |
| Kagi | direct | https://kagi.com/assistant?q={q} |
| Consensus | direct | https://consensus.app/?q={q} |
| SciSpace | direct | https://scispace.com/?q={q} |
| Andi | direct | https://andisearch.com/?q={q} |
Ask Policy — the permission layer
Publishers state how engines may use their content, at two levels: the ai:allow meta tag per page (a comma list of summarize, cite, compare; absent = permissive), and a site-level /ai.txt file. When cite is allowed, engines attribute using ai:cite_as and link the source.
Discovery
A site advertises support with a /.well-known/ai-share.json file declaring its protocol version, policy, and supported engines — see ours.
Open & stewarded
The Ask AI Protocol is an open specification — free to implement, with no AskThis product required (the widget is one implementation, not a prerequisite). AskThis stewards the registry and versioning in the open, with backward-compatible additions only within a major version. Full governance, the license, and the stability guarantees are on the developer site: askthis.dev/protocol/governance.
Learn more
The complete, versioned specification is at askthis.dev/protocol. See also the Changelog, the FAQ, and the validator for checking a targets.json, ai-share.json, or a page’s AI Graph tags.