Plain-language definitions for the vocabulary of agentic and programmatic advertising.https://adtechglossary.com/en-ushttps://adtechglossary.com/concepts/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/signals/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/concepts/adcp/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/concepts/adcp-vs-aamp-terminology/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/concepts/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/concepts/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/realtime/artf-intent/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/governance/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/signals/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/signals/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/concepts/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/media-buying/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/concepts/opendirect/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/media-buying/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/governance/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/media-buying/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/realtime/rtb-mutation/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/agents/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/signals/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/about/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/concepts/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/negotiation/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://adtechglossary.com/realtime/trusted-match-protocol/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.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT