AURA: The Protocol for a Machine-Readable Web
AURA (Agent-Usable Resource Assertion) is an open protocol for making websites understandable and operable by AI agents. It proposes a new standard for AI-web interaction that moves beyond fragile screen scraping and DOM manipulation towards a robust, secure, and efficient machine-readable layer for the internet.
The web was built for human eyes. AURA is a specification for giving it a machine-readable "API".
The Vision: Why AURA?
Current AI agents interact with websites in a brittle and inefficient way:
Screen Scraping: They "look" at pixels and guess where to click. This is slow, expensive, and breaks with the slightest UI change. DOM Manipulation: They parse complex HTML structures, which are inconsistent across sites and change frequently. Insecurity: Website owners have no control over what an agent might do.
AURA solves this by allowing websites to declare their capabilities in a simple, standardized aura.json manifest file.
Instead of an agent guessing how to "create a post," the website explicitly states:
"I have a capability named create_post . It's an HTTP POST to /api/posts and requires title and content parameters."
This is a fundamental paradigm shift from imperative guessing to declarative interaction.
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