The agents.txt IETF draft just expired. Here is what happens next.

The agents.txt IETF draft just expired this morning. If you deployed it, here is what to know. What agents.txt was agents.txt was a small spec inspired by robots.txt. The idea: drop a plain-text file at /.well-known/agents.txt declaring which automated agents your site permits, what content endpoints they should hit, and what capabilities you expose. It was the simplest possible answer to "how does an AI agent figure out what to do here without scraping HTML." The draft hit the IETF datatracker in late 2025 as draft-agents-txt-00. It was never going to be a heavyweight standard. It was a 14-page document trying to claim a /.well-known slot before anyone else did. It expired today, April 10 2026, at the standard six-month mark. No -01 revision was filed. Why it expired The honest answer: the working group never coalesced. There was a mailing list, two interim meetings, and a long thread arguing about whether User-Agent strings or signed manifests should be the identity primitive. The au