The search industry is rapidly producing new standards, protocols, and frameworks.
Terms like MCP, A2A, ARD, or LLMs.txt have been littering LinkedIn and industry publications.
As overwhelming as another collection of acronyms may seem, most of these standards are attempting to solve different problems at different layers of the emerging agent ecosystem.
Mapping These Protocols
These standards impact different parts of the agent journey, and they impact in different ways. The map (below) looks at whether the protocol is action-oriented (provides agency – agent-driven) or knowledge-oriented (provides information – considered publisher-driven).
This isn’t just a single axis; it helps to think of it plotted as:
- Action – knowledge.
- Agent – publisher.
These different standards are at different levels of maturity and adoption and mean different things depending on your job and where you spend your time on a day-to-day basis.
The Five-Minute Version
Each of these frameworks can be complex and is changing all the time, so treat the below as a short primer to see if/when/how you should handle each.
For most organizations today, the priority order is:
- Understand the landscape.
- Improve discoverability.
- Expose capabilities where appropriate.
- Monitor emerging standards.
Many businesses are already worrying about step four while still struggling with steps one and two.
Official Specifications
If you think any of these protocols are what you are looking for, I’d strongly suggest reading their docs as my (quicky) summary above (and the changing nature of this space), means it’s a surer way to get what you need.
Wait, Don’t Some Of These Compete?
Some of these standards overlap, while others solve adjacent problems. In some cases, their creators position them as alternatives for particular use cases, making it easy to assume they’re direct competitors when they’re often complementary.
A2A, for example, claims to be a better option than MCP servers in some situations, and ARD/WebMCP both appear to more to the same goal.
This table should help you understand why/when some standards may be used over others.
The overlap is mostly around discovery, invocation, and orchestration.
What Should We Actually Focus On?
AI agents won’t interact with websites through a single protocol any more than browsers interact with websites through a single HTML tag. The future is likely to involve a collection of complementary (sometimes conflicting) standards, each solving a different part of the interaction between content, capabilities, systems and transactions.
The important thing isn’t to adopt every new acronym that appears. It’s to recognize the problem each one is trying to solve, understand whether it’s relevant to your organization, and keep an eye on the standards that are gaining genuine adoption rather than simply generating discussion.
After reading this, if you’re thinking you might wait it out a little…
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