Governance artifacts
Governance files brought into scope by this page
This page is anchored to published surfaces that declare identity, precedence, limits, and the corpus reading conditions. Their order below gives the recommended reading sequence.
Canonical AI entrypoint
/.well-known/ai-governance.json
Neutral entrypoint that declares the governance map, precedence chain, and the surfaces to read first.
- Governs
- Access order across surfaces and initial precedence.
- Bounds
- Free readings that bypass the canon or the published order.
Does not guarantee: This surface publishes a reading order; it does not force execution or obedience.
Public AI manifest
/ai-manifest.json
Structured inventory of the surfaces, registries, and modules that extend the canonical entrypoint.
- Governs
- Access order across surfaces and initial precedence.
- Bounds
- Free readings that bypass the canon or the published order.
Does not guarantee: This surface publishes a reading order; it does not force execution or obedience.
Dual Web index
/dualweb-index.md
Canonical index of published surfaces, precedence, and extended machine-first reading.
- Governs
- Access order across surfaces and initial precedence.
- Bounds
- Free readings that bypass the canon or the published order.
Does not guarantee: This surface publishes a reading order; it does not force execution or obedience.
Complementary artifacts (2)
These surfaces extend the main block. They add context, discovery, routing, or observation depending on the topic.
LLMs.txt
/llms.txt
Short discovery surface that points systems toward the useful machine-first entry surfaces.
LLMs-full.txt
/llms-full.txt
Extended discovery surface for readers that consume richer context.
Evidence layer
Probative surfaces brought into scope by this page
This page does more than point to governance files. It is also anchored to surfaces that make observation, traceability, fidelity, and audit more reconstructible. Their order below makes the minimal evidence chain explicit.
- 01Response authorizationQ-Layer: response legitimacy
- 02Weak observationQ-Ledger
- 03Derived measurementQ-Metrics
Q-Layer: response legitimacy
/response-legitimacy.md
Surface that explains when to answer, when to suspend, and when to switch to legitimate non-response.
- Makes provable
- The legitimacy regime to apply before treating an output as receivable.
- Does not prove
- Neither that a given response actually followed this regime nor that an agent applied it at runtime.
- Use when
- When a page deals with authority, non-response, execution, or restraint.
Q-Ledger
/.well-known/q-ledger.json
Public ledger of inferred sessions that makes some observed consultations and sequences visible.
- Makes provable
- That a behavior was observed as weak, dated, contextualized trace evidence.
- Does not prove
- Neither actor identity, system obedience, nor strong proof of activation.
- Use when
- When it is necessary to distinguish descriptive observation from strong attestation.
Q-Metrics
/.well-known/q-metrics.json
Derived layer that makes some variations more comparable from one snapshot to another.
- Makes provable
- That an observed signal can be compared, versioned, and challenged as a descriptive indicator.
- Does not prove
- Neither the truth of a representation, the fidelity of an output, nor real steering on its own.
- Use when
- To compare windows, prioritize an audit, and document a before/after.
The web used to publish documents. It is starting to publish reading conditions. This shift remains underappreciated. People talk a lot about indexing, extraction, synthesis, ranking, and citation. Much less attention is paid to a deeper evolution: the explicit publication of a reading order, an authority perimeter, and interpretive boundaries.
From the page to the reading regime
Historically, a site publishes pages and lets search engines, browsers, or human readers reconstruct the hierarchy. In an interpreted web, that becomes too weak. Systems do not merely read a page. They cross-check, synthesize, arbitrate, and infer. Publishing content without publishing the conditions of reading leaves too much room for improvisation.
That is why the next web will also be a web of declared precedence: entrypoints, canons, governance files, negative surfaces, traces, and proof protocols.
What this actually changes
This evolution does not replace web architecture. It adds a layer to it. Sites no longer publish only:
- pages;
- internal relations;
- crawl signals.
They also publish:
- what must prevail;
- what is not authorized as inference;
- what counts as proof;
- what remains observation only;
- what should lead to silence.
The web is therefore becoming, little by little, a space in which organizations negotiate not only visibility, but also their conditions of reconstruction.
Why this matters strategically
Organizations that publish those conditions earlier will not control systems. What they will do is reduce the space of free reconstruction, stabilize identity more effectively, and make drifts easier to contest. That is a major shift. In a probabilistic environment, publishing reading conditions is often more powerful than commenting on downstream effects.
What this does not mean
This is neither a universal new protocol nor a promise of automatic compliance. It is a strategic shift: publishing becomes closer to a governance infrastructure, not only an editorial surface.