Personal Agent Protocol (PAP)
Watching. The v0.1 specification is not yet published.
PAP is meant to define how a personal agent discovers what a business offers, starts a session as a guest or a signed-in customer (built on OAuth), and acts with read-only or write access the customer grants. Payments are described as a future extension.
Governed by: Announced 6 Oct 2026 by Meta and Sierra with Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. Described as an open standard.
Official source: Announcement (spec not yet published)
What ARC sees
Live: n = 3,309 stores with a completed HTTP check, latest as of 11 Oct 2026 (UTC). Live figures (n = 3,309) update hourly from saved checks. Downloads are the dated weekly snapshot 2026-10-09.r3, n = 3,308, so their counts can differ.
Declared
—
Not measuredLive watch only; not saved
Valid
—
Not measuredNo published spec
Usable
—
Not measuredNot checked
Transacts
—
Not measuredNot checked
What ARC checks
- Store pages run a live watch for candidate /.well-known paths and HTML markers. These results are not saved, so they are not counted here.
What ARC can't check from outside
- Conformance: there is no published spec to test against yet.
- Signed-in sessions and permissions.
Methodology
Counts use each store's latest completed HTTP check saved by ARC. Failed checks are left out of the denominator. Each host counts once.
Measured means ARC observed it directly. Inferred means ARC links two observations that do not prove each other. Not measured means ARC has no saved evidence, and the count is not zero adoption.
A checkout link means a cart was created for one real product. It is not a completed purchase. ARC never places orders.
The sample is ARC's curated store list plus stores people checked. It is not all of e-commerce. Treat percentages as rates in this sample.
Reads make no store requests and no model calls.
Cite this
ARC Protocol Matrix: PAP, arcreport.ai/protocols/pap, accessed 2026-10-11. Licensed CC-BY-4.0. Data: arcreport.ai/data.