Agentic Resource Discovery: Search engine for AI agents
ARD enables AI agents to automatically find suitable tools at runtime. Google integrates ARD into its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
(Image: Manuel Masiero / KI / iX)
Google, along with launch partners such as Cisco, GitHub, Hugging Face, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Snowflake, has introduced Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD). With the open specification, AI agents can automatically find and use suitable agentic tools on the web during the execution of their tasks.
ARD specifies publicly accessible directories where agents can find tools and services across organizations and independently of the underlying framework, protocol, or provider. This enables them to answer three core questions: Where can I find a suitable capability, which one should I use for the upcoming task, and is the selected capability also secure?
Until now, this role was practically exclusively held by humans. Interoperability protocols such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) or individual skills assume that the developer already knows which tool, skill, or agent is needed for the respective task. This, in turn, means that the tools must already be installed.
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Search engine for agents
ARD is based on two building blocks: catalogs and registries. To populate the former, providers publish an ai-catalog.json file on their domain, describing the capabilities of their AI services, such as MCP servers, A2A agents, or OpenAPI tools. The domain simultaneously forms the cryptographic trust basis for https://<publisher-domain>/.well-known/ai-catalog.json.
(Image:Â Google)
Registries take on the role of the search engine for the agent web. They crawl the catalogs, index them, and provide suitable resources, including verification metadata, in response to search queries. Agents can dynamically load the selected function, use its native protocol or API for data exchange, and return the result to developers.
The open-source project, currently available as a v0.9 draft, is under the Apache 2.0 license. Google is integrating ARD into Google Cloud as part of the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Some launch partners, such as Hugging Face, have already presented their reference implementations. A complete list can be found on the official Agentic Resource Discovery website, which also contains the specifications.
(mro)
