The open protocol for AI sharing
How a page is handed to an AI engine with a portable, source-citing prompt. Free in the widget, open for anyone to implement.
Cited Ask
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; the widget additionally caps its rendered prompt at 1800 characters.
Ask Targets
Each target declares how to open an engine with the prompt:direct (the URL prefills the prompt) orcopy (the prompt is copied to the clipboard and the engine's home opens). The canonical machine-readable registry lives at/protocol/targets.json.
Ask Policy
Publishers state how engines may use their content: theai:allow meta tag per page (a comma list of summarize,cite,compare; absent = permissive), and a site-level/ai.txt file. Whencite is allowed, engines attribute using ai:cite_asand link the source.
Stable & open
- Open spec, free to implement — no AskThis product required.
- AskThis stewards the registry and versioning, in the open.
- Versioned spec (v1.0); canonical home askthis.dev/protocol.
- Discovery via a site-level /.well-known/ai-share.json file.
- Backward-compatible additions only within a major version.
On the developer site:Contribute an engine ·Changelog ·FAQ ·Validate a file or page
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.