References

Linked spec authorities ordered by stability. RFCs are stable; IETF working-group drafts are tracked but mutable; vendor proposals get re-validated each quarter.

Published RFCs (stable)

• RFC 9309 — Robots Exclusion Protocol
• RFC 8288 — Web Linking
• RFC 8615 — Well-Known URIs
• RFC 9421 — HTTP Message Signatures
• RFC 9727 — API Catalog
• RFC 8414 — OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Metadata
• RFC 9728 — OAuth 2.0 Protected Resource Metadata
• schema.org
• sitemaps.org

IETF working groups & drafts (tracked)

• IETF AI Preferences WG — draft-ietf-aipref-vocab
• IETF Web Bot Auth WG (chartered early 2026)
• draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture-05
• draft-meunier-http-message-signatures-directory-05

Vendor proposals & conventions (validate quarterly)

• llmstxt.org — /llms.txt community proposal (Howard / Answer.AI, 2024)
• Cloudflare — Introducing the Agent Readiness Score (April 17, 2026)
• Cloudflare — Markdown for Agents
• Cloudflare — Content Signals Policy
• Cloudflare — Redirects for AI Training
• MCP SEP-2127 — Server Cards via /.well-known/mcp/server-card.json
• Cloudflare Agent Skills Discovery RFC — /.well-known/agent-skills/index.json (v0.2, March 2026)
• x402 Foundation (Linux Foundation, 2026)

Bing / Microsoft

• Bing Webmaster Tools — AI Performance Report (public preview) (Feb 2026) — Bing’s first-party AI citation dashboard
• IndexNow — Microsoft’s push-indexing protocol

Measurement & tooling

• IsItAgentReady (Cloudflare) — primary scanner; also exposed via Cloudflare URL Scanner API agentReadiness mode
• Cloudflare Radar — weekly adoption dataset across top 200K domains
• Profound
• Semrush AI Visibility
• Scrunch, Adobe LLM Optimizer, AthenaHQ, Peec AI, Conductor

Expert sources (in _sources/)

Six expert digests, one cross-source comparison index, and three engine / study digests staged for restructuring:

• _sources/expert-jason-barnard.md — entity-first, Algorithmic Trinity, Brand SERP
• _sources/expert-lily-ray.md — “AEO/GEO is expansion, not replacement”; off-site mentions; E-E-A-T
• _sources/expert-mike-king.md — Relevance Engineering, query fan-out (Qforia), passage retrieval, May 2026 critique of Google’s GEO guidance
• _sources/expert-aleyda-solis.md — 5-axis SEO vs GEO framework, operational checklist, terminology survey
• _sources/expert-andrea-volpini.md — knowledge-graph navigability, RLM-on-KG, “structure is the moat”
• _sources/expert-britney-muller.md — probabilistic systems, training-data + RAG two-layer model, proprietary [Brand] Index
• _sources/expert-comparison-index.md — cross-source grid + six open questions for v1.2
• _sources/bing-position-on-seo-aeo-geo.md — Microsoft’s Feb 2026 official position
• _sources/google-ai-optimization-guide.md.txt — Google’s official “AEO/GEO is still SEO” guide
• _sources/ahrefs-schema-ai-citations.md — DiD study: schema does not lift citations on already-cited pages