# Ad Tech Glossary

> Plain-language definitions for the vocabulary of agentic and programmatic advertising.

One entry per term, defined from the specification that declares it and matched to the counterpart term in the other protocol. Where a specification is silent, contradictory or empty, the entry says so rather than filling the gap.

## Pages

- [AAMP](https://adtechglossary.com/concepts/aamp/): AAMP is IAB Tech Lab's umbrella label for nine separately versioned agentic advertising repositories, spanning a control plane, a bidstream mutation framework and an embedding exchange. It has no version: each repository tags independently.
- [Access Tier](https://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/access-tier/): Access Tier is AAMP's four-value enum (public, seat, agency, advertiser) that gates what price, negotiation and availability detail a buyer agent gets. It travels as buyer_tier, is capped server-side by the calling agent's trust status, and is never self-asserted.
- [Signal Activation](https://adtechglossary.com/signals/activation/): Signal activation is the AdCP call that makes a discovered signal usable on a named destination, taking a segment handle and a list of destinations and returning an activation key once the deployment is live.
- [Ad Context Protocol](https://adtechglossary.com/concepts/adcp/): AdCP (Ad Context Protocol) is an open advertising standard from AgenticAdvertising.org whose stable 3.1.13 release registers 64 operations across ten schema groups, carried over MCP and A2A at planning time and plain HTTP at serve time.
- [AdCP to AAMP terminology map](https://adtechglossary.com/concepts/adcp-vs-aamp-terminology/): The AdCP to AAMP terminology map pairs the vocabularies of the two agentic advertising standards term by term, showing which words translate between them. Of the eight words both stacks use, only Product and Account mean the same thing in each.
- [Agent](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/agent/): In AdCP an agent is the authenticated caller identified by its auth token, distinct from a Sales Agent (the server exposing inventory) and an AI Agent (the assistant), while AAMP makes an agent a registry-issued record instead.
- [Agent Card](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/agent-card/): An agent card is the JSON identity document an agent publishes at a well-known URL under the A2A protocol: who operates it, where its endpoints are, which protocol version it speaks, what skills it claims and how to authenticate against it.
- [Agent Registry](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/agent-registry/): An agent registry is a directory of advertising agents, their endpoints, capabilities and trust signals. Two run: AgenticAdvertising.org's catalog for AdCP, which confers no authority, and IAB Tech Lab's for AAMP, where trust status caps price.
- [Agentic Advertising](https://adtechglossary.com/concepts/agentic-advertising/): Agentic advertising is the category name for advertising planned, bought and sold by AI agents acting for a buyer and a seller, rather than by humans in dashboards.
- [Agentic Buying](https://adtechglossary.com/concepts/agentic-buying/): Agentic buying is media procurement performed by software agents: a buyer agent and a seller agent discover, price and agree a media buy, so the unit transacted is a booked buy rather than an impression won at auction.
- [Intent (ARTF)](https://adtechglossary.com/realtime/artf-intent/): Intent in ARTF is the reason an agent gives for an edit to a live bid request, carried on the wire as an 8-value protobuf enum that the framework document and the Agent Manifest both contradict.
- [Audience Constraints](https://adtechglossary.com/governance/audience-constraints/): Audience constraints in AdCP are the plan-level include and exclude rules a governance agent evaluates seller targeting against during check_governance, where exclusions take precedence over inclusions.
- [Audience vs Signal](https://adtechglossary.com/signals/audience-vs-signal/): An audience is buyer-owned CRM data uploaded to one seller account with sync_audiences and not portable across sellers, while a signal is a targeting dimension published by someone else and discovered with get_signals.
- [Brand Agent](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/brand-agent/): A brand agent is the AdCP agent that answers questions about a brand identity and licenses its rights. In AdCP 3.1.13 it is declared as an agents[] entry with type "brand" in brand.json. AAMP has no equivalent.
- [Buyer Agent](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/buyer-agent/): A buyer agent is the demand-side software in an agentic media transaction: it takes a campaign brief, finds sellers, decides what to buy, books it, and hands the deal ID to a DSP for activation. AdCP calls the role an orchestrator.
- [Deal](https://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/deal/): A deal is a negotiated buying arrangement between one buyer and one seller, identified by a seller-issued deal ID the buyer activates in its DSP. In AAMP it is the booking record a quote becomes; AdCP defines no deal object.
- [Discovery Files](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/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; AdCP defines two, adagents.json and brand.json, and AAMP defines none.
- [Governance Agent](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/governance-agent/): A governance agent is an external service a buyer configures to validate campaign actions before they execute; both the orchestrator and the seller call check_governance against it, and in AdCP 3.1.13 that surface is still marked experimental.
- [Hashed Identifier](https://adtechglossary.com/signals/hashed-identifier/): A hashed identifier is a SHA-256 digest of a normalized email address or E.164 phone number sent in place of the cleartext value, which AdCP classifies as pseudonymous PII rather than anonymous or privacy-preserving.
- [MCP and A2A](https://adtechglossary.com/concepts/mcp-and-a2a/): MCP and A2A are general-purpose agent transports with no advertising semantics: AdCP requires a sales agent to support at least one, AAMP adds REST over OpenDirect 2.1, and neither protocol requires an agent to declare which transport it speaks.
- [Media Buy](https://adtechglossary.com/media-buying/media-buy/): In AdCP, a media buy is the purchased-campaign object created by create_media_buy, carrying the total budget, lifecycle status, an optimistic-concurrency revision and an array of packages.
- [Negotiation Round](https://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/negotiation-round/): A negotiation round in AAMP is one recorded offer-and-counter exchange between a buyer agent and a seller agent, carrying both prices, the seller's action and the concession taken, while AdCP has no negotiation protocol.
- [OpenDirect 2.1](https://adtechglossary.com/concepts/opendirect/): OpenDirect 2.1 is IAB Tech Lab's REST standard for booking guaranteed ad inventory, and AAMP's control plane inherits its Account, Order, Line and Product objects, though no AAMP repository implements more than 13 of the standard's 23 objects.
- [Package](https://adtechglossary.com/media-buying/package/): An AdCP package is one product inside a media buy, the equivalent of a line item in an ad server, carrying its own budget, pacing, flight dates, format selection and creative assignments.
- [Policy Category](https://adtechglossary.com/governance/policy-category/): A policy category in AdCP is a registry-defined regulatory regime declared on a campaign plan, such as fair_housing or children_directed, which resolves to policies the campaign must obey and to attributes it must not target on.
- [Product](https://adtechglossary.com/media-buying/product/): In AdCP, a product is a unit of sellable advertising inventory offered by a seller and returned by get_products, describing the properties it runs on, how it delivers, what it costs and what the seller can report on.
- [Quote](https://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/quote/): A Quote in AAMP is a seller agent's non-binding, expiring price offer for one product over one flight, which a buyer books into a Deal by quote_id. AdCP defines no equivalent object.
- [Mutation (ARTF)](https://adtechglossary.com/realtime/rtb-mutation/): A mutation is ARTF's proposed change to an OpenRTB bid request or response, carrying an intent, an operation, a path and at most one of five typed payloads, which the orchestrator may accept or reject.
- [Sales Agent](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/sales-agent/): A sales agent is the seller-side server that exposes publisher inventory for discovery and purchase under AdCP, a role AAMP calls a seller agent and the newer AdCP schemas do too.
- [Seller Agent](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/seller-agent/): A seller agent is AAMP's supply-side agent: it publishes a media kit, prices by buyer tier, negotiates and books deals. AdCP's glossary calls the same role a sales agent while its schemas ship a seller_agent field.
- [Signal Agent](https://adtechglossary.com/agents/signal-agent/): A signal agent is an AdCP server that discovers and activates advertising signals over MCP or A2A, implementing get_signals and activate_signal, authorised signal by signal by data providers in adagents.json.
- [Signal Definition](https://adtechglossary.com/signals/signal-definition/): A signal definition is one entry in a data provider's published adagents.json signals[]: AdCP 3.1.13 gives it 31 fields, seven of identity and shape, three of them required (id, name, value_type), and 24 optional provenance and consent disclosures.
- [Sources and Versions](https://adtechglossary.com/about/sources-and-versions/): A pinned source commit is the exact repository revision a definition was written from. This glossary sources AdCP terms from published stable release 3.1.13, and AAMP terms from eight independently versioned repositories with no shared version number.
- [Sponsored Intelligence](https://adtechglossary.com/concepts/sponsored-intelligence/): Sponsored Intelligence (SI) is AdCP's name for advertising on AI surfaces, and it covers two things: a stable media channel bought through get_products, and an experimental four-operation chat protocol for brand-agent sessions.
- [Trust Status](https://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/trust-status/): Trust status is AAMP's five-value label on a counterparty agent - unknown, registered, approved, preferred or blocked - that caps the maximum access tier that agent may claim. Three of the five are set by a seller operator.
- [Trusted Match Protocol (TMP)](https://adtechglossary.com/realtime/trusted-match-protocol/): Trusted Match Protocol is AdCP's serve-time execution layer: two operations, context_match and identity_match, kept structurally apart so page context and user identity never share a request, with the publisher joining the two responses locally.

## Optional

- [Full text corpus](https://adtechglossary.com/llms-full.txt): every page as one markdown file
- [Agentic Ad Lab](https://agenticadlab.com): Protocol-neutral reference for agentic advertising: AdCP, AAMP, and how machines buy media.
- [Brief Gateway](https://briefgateway.com): Turn a campaign brief into a structured object a seller agent can actually consume.
- [AdCP Explorer](https://adcpexplorer.com): Every Ad Context Protocol task, schema and discovery file, browsable and linkable.
- [AAMP Explorer](https://aampexplorer.com): Reference for IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Advertising Management Protocols and their component repos.
- [What Is Agentic Buying](https://whatisagenticbuying.com): A single, definitive, citable answer to one question.