Protocol · v0.2 · Draft
The NOD Protocol is an open standard for describing a business so AI agents can understand who it is and what it can do. A single JSON file at /.well-known/nod.json.
v0.2 splits the protocol into a small, universal core and a set of composable extensions. Adopt the core to be discoverable; adopt extensions to expose the agent-commerce surface, narrative voice, and vertical-specific data.
Currently at v0.2 · see changelog →
Most business information today is locked in human-readable HTML and JavaScript. Agents can read it, but only by guessing. The NOD Protocol gives a business one place to state, in machine-readable form, what it is and how an agent can interact with it — identity, location, industry, products, transactions, policies.
One file. One URL. Read by any agent that asks.
v0.2 separates two things that v0.1 conflated. The core describes a business’s identity — name, NAICS classification, locations, contacts, legal identifiers — and is universal across all businesses, agentic or not. The extensions carry everything else, opt-in.
Three extensions ship with v0.2:
ai.opennod.agent-commerce
The agent contract: discovery, transactions, information, support, and policies. Adopting this extension is what makes a manifest agent-ready.
ai.opennod.schema-org-bridge
A meta-schema for declaring a Schema.org LocalBusiness subtype and its inline properties — servesCuisine for restaurants, medicalSpecialty for clinics — without inventing parallel field names.
ai.opennod.merchant-voice
The narrative layer: positioning, ideal customer, story, specialties, accommodations. The things a merchant would tell an agent if the agent asked.
A business that adopts only the core is a directory entry. A business that adds agent-commerce is open for business with agents. The two were the same thing in v0.1; they are deliberately not in v0.2.
v0.1 used a 12-value business.type enum to classify industries. It could not represent the actual diversity of businesses, so v0.2 replaces it with NAICS 2022 — the US Census Bureau’s industry classification system, 2,125 entries across 5 levels. There is no novel taxonomy here to learn or fork.
Vertical fields (cuisine type, medical specialty, hotel amenities) move to the schema-org-bridge extension, which adopts Schema.org’s LocalBusiness subtypes directly. If Schema.org already has a field for it, the NOD Protocol uses that field.
The protocol’s job is to compose existing standards into one machine-readable identity, not to invent new vocabulary where the web already has one.
NAICS describes what a business is. Schema.org describes what it sells. Neither describes how an agent transacts with it. That is what ai.opennod.agent-commerce contributes — and it is OpenNOD’s specific contribution to the standards stack.
The extension carries five blocks: discovery (catalogs, search endpoints), transactions (purchase endpoints, payment rails, return and shipping policies), information (live signals like inventory and pricing), support (post-transaction interfaces), and policies (allowed actions, rate limits, confirmation requirements).
Payment methods in v0.2 are no longer a flat string list. Each method declares its rail, agent_endpoint, supported currencies, settlement window, and amount bounds — the fields an agent actually needs to decide whether it can complete a purchase.
The full v0.2 specification — core schema, extension schemas, the NAICS taxonomy file, examples, and the drift-detection test — lives in the open at github.com/nod-protocol/nod-protocol. Apache 2.0 licensed. Issues and pull requests welcome.
v0.2 is a draft. The protocol is pre-1.0 and carries no stability commitments yet — v0.2 is a breaking change from v0.1, and v1.0 will be where breaking changes start being gated behind major-version bumps.
v0.2 introduces a drift-detection test that enforces agreement between the published version, the schema, and every shipped example. The intent is that the spec, the code, and the docs do not silently disagree.
Read the changelog →·Roadmap toward v1.0 →
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