Verified 1 September 2026

ARD conformance: what the official test checks, and how to run it on any registry or manifest

The Agentic Resource Discovery specification ships its own conformance tool. It validates a manifest (is this ard.json something a consumer can rely on) and a registry (does this search service behave as the specification says). Neuronto passes both with zero errors and zero warnings; the commands below reproduce that result against any URL, including this one.

Run it

git clone https://github.com/ards-project/ard-spec
cd ard-spec
conformance/bin/conformance-test manifest https://neuronto.com/.well-known/ard.json
conformance/bin/conformance-test registry https://neuronto.com

Substitute your own domain to test your manifest, or another registry's root to test it as a registry.

What the manifest check covers

• the document parses and carries specVersion, a host and an entries list
• every entry has an identifier in the URN form the specification defines, with the publisher segment matching the domain
• every entry delivers its resource by value or by reference, not both and not neither
• media types are ones the specification recognises

What the registry check covers

• POST /search answers 200 with a results list, and every item carries identifier, score and source
• POST /explore, if present, returns a facets object
• GET /agents, if present, returns a properly paginated object, not a bare list

Where registries fail

The most common failure seen across the public registries is GET /agents answering 200 with a body that is not a paginated object. The tool marks the whole registry FAIL on exactly that, however good its search results are. The second is a manifest served on only one of the two well-known paths: the specification's version 0.91 renamed ai-catalog.json to ard.json, and most deployed publishers still serve only the older name, so a consumer checking one path misses most of the ecosystem. Serve both.

Neuronto's result

It is re-run after every deployment. The result is stated here rather than as a badge because a badge cannot be re-run and a command can.

Check your own manifest without installing anything

The free audit runs the same conformance checks on your manifest, entry by entry, with each finding written as an instruction rather than an error code, and then asks every public registry whether they return you. pip install ard-publish gives you ard-publish validate for the local half and ard-publish check for the live one.