Layer 01: Discovery & Capability Graph

UCP: Universal Commerce Protocol

Q: What happens if a domain lacks a /.well-known/ucp manifest?

Autonomous shopping and procurement agents must fall back to scraping unstructured HTML, where pricing ambiguity and JavaScript hydration delays frequently cause the domain to be excluded from vendor shortlists.

Q: Can UCP expose service retainers and custom consulting scopes?

Yes. UCP supports fixed-fee diagnostics, implementation sprints, recurring operational retainers, and dynamic rules-based negotiation pointers.

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) gives autonomous research and procurement agents a single canonical endpoint at /.well-known/ucp to discover what your business offers, how services are priced, which regions you serve, and how to connect via REST, MCP, or A2A.

Canonical Definition

Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open discovery specification served at /.well-known/ucp that publishes structured merchant identity, service catalogs, pricing models, and transport bindings for AI agents in under 300ms.

Inspect Live /.well-known/ucp View UCP Implementation Scope

v2026-01

Active protocol version

<120ms

Edge manifest TTFB

REST + MCP + A2A

Declared agent transports

Machine Handshake Sequence

Phase	Actor	Operation
01. Well-Known Probe	Buyer Agent	Requests GET /.well-known/ucp with zero JavaScript execution.
02. Capability Graph Parse	UCP Layer	Returns verified merchant profile, 18 structured capabilities, SLA tiers, and downstream ACP/AP2 endpoints.
03. Transport Upgrade	Buyer Agent	Selects REST negotiation or MCP tool binding to request a deterministic scope quote.

Reference JSON Payload

{
  "ucp_version": "2026-01",
  "merchant": {
    "id": "leverageiq-group",
    "name": "LeverageIQ Group",
    "domain": "leverageiqgroup.com",
    "slogan": "The ROI of Machine Intelligence"
  },
  "transports": [
    "rest",
    "mcp",
    "a2a"
  ],
  "endpoints": {
    "catalog": "/api/ucp",
    "negotiate": "/api/acp/negotiate",
    "checkout": "/api/acp/checkout",
    "mandates": "/.well-known/ap2/mandates.json"
  },
  "sla_html_budget_ms": 300
}

UCP Engineering FAQ

What happens if a domain lacks a /.well-known/ucp manifest?

Autonomous shopping and procurement agents must fall back to scraping unstructured HTML, where pricing ambiguity and JavaScript hydration delays frequently cause the domain to be excluded from vendor shortlists.

Can UCP expose service retainers and custom consulting scopes?

Yes. UCP supports fixed-fee diagnostics, implementation sprints, recurring operational retainers, and dynamic rules-based negotiation pointers.