{
 "id": "well-known",
 "group": null,
 "part_of": null,
 "name": "Well-known URI",
 "aliases": [
  ".well-known",
  "/.well-known/"
 ],
 "definition_md": "A **well-known URI** is a path beginning `/.well-known/` at the root of an origin, reserved by RFC 8615 (May 2019, obsoleting RFC 5785) so that applications needing site-wide metadata do not have to negotiate arbitrary paths or risk colliding with a site's existing URL space. Anyone minting a new well-known name is expected to register it with IANA, referencing the specification that defines its format and media type; the mechanism itself defines no content at `/.well-known/` and clients should not assume anything exists there by default. The agentic web reuses this pattern heavily: `/.well-known/agent-card.json` (A2A), `/.well-known/ard.json` and its predecessor `/.well-known/ai-catalog.json` (ARD), and others each register or informally claim a name under this prefix rather than inventing a new discovery convention. Used by: a2a, ard, ai-catalog-well-known-file.",
 "step": "discover",
 "related_protocols": [
  "a2a",
  "ard",
  "ai-catalog-well-known-file"
 ],
 "sources": [
  {
   "url": "https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8615",
   "date": "2019-05",
   "label": "VERIFIED"
  }
 ],
 "url": "https://agenticweb.wiki/terms/well-known/",
 "category": "discover",
 "type": "term"
}