The Digital Karma Federation
The Federation is an open protocol for AI-readable websites. Member sites publish a fixed set of machine-readable endpoints describing what they cover, what they contain, how healthy they are, and who they are connected to. Any site can implement it without registering anywhere or asking permission.
Why a protocol rather than a checklist
A page that reads well is a good page. A site that publishes a catalog of its own content, in a fixed shape at a predictable address, is something an agent can use without guessing.
The difference matters more every year. A crawler that has to infer what a site is about from prose will keep getting it partly wrong. A crawler that can read a declaration gets it right, and it costs the publisher one generated file.
What a member site publishes
- A manifest. Identity, what the site covers, and which content types it carries.
- A catalog. The actual content, as machine-readable datasets, generated from the content rather than typed by hand.
- A health record. Whether the endpoints are current and what state the site is in.
- A karma record. The site's own signal summary, with the components visible rather than a bare number.
- A federation record. Which sites it is connected to and how.
- An llm.txt. The plain text version, for anything that would rather read prose.
QuickRankAI publishes all six. They are linked in the footer of every page and you are welcome to go and read them.
What it is not
It is not a ranking system, a directory you pay to join, or something a search engine has agreed to honor. It is a publishing convention with a written specification, and its value is that the files are there, correct, and generated from real content rather than hand-maintained until they drift.
How it connects to the inspection
The inspection stops at the edge of a single URL, because that is what an outside reader can honestly measure. The Federation is the version of the same question asked about a whole site and the assets connected to it.
If your inspection score is fine and your site still is not found, the interesting work has already moved past the page.
The current specification is published by DigitalKarmaWeb.com, which acts as the specification authority and hosts an optional registry it does not control membership through.