Answer for yourself.

Assistants answer questions about your business every day, from whatever they scraped months ago. This is how you give them the answer instead.

Someone asks an AI assistant whether your café is open on Monday. It has never been to your café. It answers from a copy of a listing that copied a directory that copied your old site — and nobody in that chain has to be wrong on purpose for the answer to be wrong.

You can end that chain. Put a small signed file on your own website, and any assistant that checks gets your answer, from you, with your signature on it. There is no account, no listing service, and nobody in the middle — including us.

It is the sign on your door. People believe the hours written there because the sign is attached to the building — nobody else could have put it up. The same hours photocopied into a leaflet in a hotel lobby might be right, or might be from 2019, and you cannot tell by looking. Today an assistant only ever gets the leaflet. The signature is what makes it the door.

What you put up

Two small files, at fixed addresses on your own site. Making them takes about five minutes; uploading them is the same as uploading any other file.

/.well-known/attestation.json

Your facts, and your signature over them. Change a character afterwards and the signature stops matching.

/.well-known/jwks.json

The public half of your key, so anyone can check the signature. Safe to publish — that is its job.

The private half never leaves your computer. Nothing is uploaded anywhere while you make them: the signing happens in your browser, on your machine.

One thing to tell whoever looks after your site: both files need to be served with the header Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *. It is a one-line setting on every host. Without it, an assistant running inside a browser sees your site as though it published nothing — the files are there, but it is not allowed to read them. They are public documents; the signature is what protects them, not secrecy.

Four people, four things worth saying

A café owner

“Is Kissaten Kohaku open on Monday?”

hours · closed days · address · phone · prices

The hours are the whole business. A cached listing that says open-daily costs you someone standing outside a shut door on a Monday, and you never hear about it.

A creator

“Is this really Hanabi Builds’ channel?”

the accounts that are actually yours · sponsorship rates

You are the only one who can say which channel, repo and handle belong to you. Anyone can claim your name; only your domain can sign for it. This is the one fact nobody else is in a position to state.

An organiser

“Can I still get a seat at the September workshop?”

what · when · where · price · and whether it is sold out

This is where a scrape is worst. A cached page says register now for weeks after the room filled. A signed one says sold out, today, with the date you said it.

A company that sells

“What does a single test jig cost?”

list prices · lead time · what you make

A published price is a fact an assistant can compare. Without one you are absent from the comparison — or worse, present at a number someone else guessed.

What an assistant sees

Not a yes or a no. Three separate questions, answered honestly, because a signature proves who spoke — never that they were right.

Authoritative Signed by the site itself, and still current. For anything you control — your hours, your prices, your policies — there is no better source in the world.
Secondhand Signed and current, but by somebody relaying rather than you. Better than an unsigned page; not the last word. You choose who may speak for you.
Stale Genuinely yours, but you stopped standing behind it. You say how long each statement is good for; after that an assistant is told to hedge.
Unverified The signature does not match the content. Something was altered after you signed it, and an assistant is told not to treat it as coming from you.

What this is not

Doing it

  1. Make a key. Once, in your browser. It downloads to your computer; keep it somewhere safe. It is what makes a statement yours.
  2. Fill in your details — or paste your existing page and let it read what your site already publishes. Most website builders emit this already. There are worked examples for all four of the cases above; load one and edit it.
  3. Download the two files and upload them to your site so they sit at the addresses above. Come back and re-sign whenever something changes, or before the statement goes stale.

Then check it the way an assistant would, and see exactly what one gets back.

Make your files →