Shelfprotocol

robots.txt for commerce. The open directory AI agents query before they buy.

Merchants publish a tiny shelf.json describing what they sell and what agents

are allowed to do. Agents make one lookup before transacting. Shelf Protocol is the

index in the middle — the handshake layer between agents and the commercial web.

Merchants publish to avoid being invisible to AI shoppers. FOMO, not a sales call.

Developers add one lookup because it's cheaper and safer than scraping. One line, spreads by copy-paste.

The index compounds : more merchants → agents prefer it → more developers depend on it → more merchants join.

The registry API (FastAPI + SQLite). Register, lookup, search, verify, stats.

The one-line lookup client a developer drops into an agent, plus the MCP server and the LangChain/CrewAI tool adapters. Pip-installable ( pyproject.toml at repo root).

A shopping agent that uses Shelf Protocol to decide what it's allowed to buy.

Test suites ( cd tests && for t in test_*.py; do python3 $t; done ).

buy autonomously (within the merchant's declared limit) or escalate to a human.

Note: SQLite stores its file next to server/db.py by default. If you run

POST /v1/merchants with a shelf.json body (see spec/shelf.json.example for the full schema):