Google's ARD Lets AI Agents Discover and Trust Each Other Across the Web

The agentic web has a discovery problem. As AI agents proliferate across organizations, they increasingly need to call on tools, skills, and other agents that live on completely different platforms -- sometimes owned by different companies entirely. Right now, there is no standard way to do that safely. Every team builds its own registry, its own trust model, its own integration glue. Google wants to fix that with a new open specification called Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD).

ARD is an open specification for publishing, discovering, and verifying AI capabilities across the web. Developed with partners across the industry, it allows tools and services to be securely shared and connected, regardless of their underlying framework, protocol, or provider. The launch coalition is substantial: Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, GoDaddy, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake are all on board from day one.

The gap ARD fills

While many platforms already feature custom registries to manage capabilities, they remain fragmented and siloed within specific ecosystems. This lack of interoperability prevents agents from easily communicating across different tools. Think about what a real-world operations agent actually needs to do: query observability systems, search engineering docs, review deployment history, open support tickets, and maybe even delegate to a specialized troubleshooting agent. Today, wiring all of that together requires bespoke integration work at every boundary.

ARD is an open discovery protocol for agentic resources. It allows an AI client to ask "What is available for this task?" and lets a discovery service answer with matching resources. ARD sits entirely before invocation. It helps the client find the right resource; the resource is then invoked through its own native protocol. An agentic resource is any external capability an AI client can call on -- an agent, MCP server, skill, API, workflow, or anything similar. Crucially, ARD is not an execution runtime -- it is not MCP, A2A, or an API runtime, and it does not replace them.