Agent roles, identity and discovery
AdCP names agent roles by the job each one does: sales, signal, brand and governance, none of which appears by name in AAMP. AAMP names the parties to a trade instead, buyer agent and seller agent.
AdCP's sales agent and AAMP's seller agent are the same role under different nouns. Buyer agent, signal agent, brand agent and governance agent name the other parties, and agent on its own means one thing in AdCP and another in AAMP. Agent card, agent registry and discovery files cover how an agent publishes an identity and how one is found.
- Agent
In AdCP an agent is the authenticated caller identified by its auth token - Agent Card
An agent card is the JSON identity document an agent publishes at a well-known URL under the A2A protocol - Agent Registry
An agent registry is a directory of advertising agents, their endpoints, capabilities and trust signals. - Brand Agent
A brand agent is the AdCP agent that answers questions about a brand identity and licenses its rights. - Buyer Agent
A buyer agent is the demand-side software in an agentic media transaction - Discovery Files
Discovery files are documents a domain owner publishes at a fixed /.well-known/ path to declare which agents may act for that domain - Governance Agent
A governance agent is an external service a buyer configures to validate campaign actions before they execute - Sales Agent
A sales agent is the seller-side server that exposes publisher inventory for discovery and purchase under AdCP - Seller Agent
A seller agent is AAMP's supply-side agent: it publishes a media kit, prices by buyer tier, negotiates and books deals. - Signal Agent
A signal agent is an AdCP server that discovers and activates advertising signals over MCP or A2A
Other sections
- Ad Tech Glossary — all 35 terms, A to Z
- Concepts and standards — The protocols themselves, the transports they run on, and the names the category is given.
- Buying objects and campaign lifecycle — A bought campaign breaks into a media buy, its packages and the products behind them.
- Signals, audiences and identity — Targeting data, who owns it, and the call that makes it usable on a destination.
- Real-time execution and bidstream agents — These terms run at serve time, while an impression is being decided.
- Deals, pricing and negotiation — How a price is agreed and booked: quotes, deals, negotiation rounds, access tiers and trust status.
- Governance, privacy and compliance — The constraints a buy has to satisfy before it is allowed to run.
- About — Which specification each definition comes from, and the terms this glossary leaves out on purpose.