An agent arrives at a merchant or publisher cold. Today it has two bad options: scrape rendered HTML (lossy and inferred) or already know it runs an MCP server or API.

There's a missing layer between an agent arriving and calling your tool: a surface the publisher authors, that an agent reads first — cheaply, deterministically — and routes it onward.

This talk is about that layer, in three parts: discovery (a declared, well-known surface stating who you are and what you offer), facts (catalog as JSON, declared-not-inferred), and actions (hand-off to MCP tools and to signed APIs / UCP-ACP).
I call the pattern Layered Agentic Retrieval (LAR), but the talk is the layering, not the label.

MCP standardizes agent-to-tool once the tool is known; REST/UCP serves data once the endpoint is known; this layer is the upstream front door that makes both discoverable to an arriving agent — the door, not the rooms.

I'll ground it in a live probe of real endpoints, situate it against the declared-surface family (llms.txt, AGENTS.md), and show why plain text for agents is already revealed preference.
The pattern is open source; you leave with a layering for your own MCP servers and APIs.