OTR Protocol — Open Trust Registry
“How Trust Works in Agentic Commerce”OTR (Open Trust Registry) is an open trust assessment protocol designed to answer the most fundamental question in agentic commerce: How does an AI agent determine whether a merchant is trustworthy?
What This Book Covers
OTR collects publicly verifiable signals — SSL certificates, DNS security records, corporate registrations, policy quality, structured data, and more — to compute a 0-100 trust score that helps AI agents make informed recommendation decisions. This book is the complete technical documentation for the OTR protocol. You can use this knowledge to:- Understand the trust scoring logic and systematically improve your domain’s score
- Integrate trust data via API into your own applications
- Build your own trust assessment system based on the open-source protocol
Table of Contents (13 Chapters)
Part I: Protocol Overview
- Why AI Agents Need a Trust Layer — The trust dilemma, shortcomings of existing mechanisms, design philosophy
- OTR Architecture Overview — Four-layer architecture, data flow, site type adaptation
Part II: Scoring Methodology
- V/S Dimensions — Verification and Security — 13 verification signals + 15 security signals
- G/T/D Dimensions — Governance, Transparency, and Data Quality — 10 + 18 + 21 signals explained in detail
- Scoring Engine — COLD Mode — Weight formula, badge tiers, score lifecycle
Part III: API Reference
- REST API Reference — Endpoints, request formats, response structures, integration examples
- MCP Server — Enabling AI agents to query OTR trust data directly
- OpenAPI Specification — OpenAPI 3.0 spec document and SDK generation
Part IV: Integration Guide
- How AI Agents Call OTR — Recommendation decision flow, caching strategies
- How Merchants Can Improve Their Score — Dimension-by-dimension optimization guide
- OTR-ID Lifecycle — Domain identifier creation and usage
Part V: Case Studies and Reference
- Case Studies — AI recommendations, supply chain assessment, brand monitoring
- Reference Manual — Signal catalog, weight tables, error codes
Look Up a Trust Score
Enter any domain to view its six-dimension trust score and signal breakdown.