--- type: InsightHub name: Glossary id: "https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary" url: "https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary" publisher: "did:web:selfe.ai" description: "Clear, plain-English explanations of every term and protocol that comes up across this site." --- # Call an agent an agent. > Every term, defined plainly. Every term and protocol that comes up across this site, defined plainly in one place. ## Start here - [What is agentic commerce?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-agentic-commerce) — Commerce where an AI agent, acting on a real person's goal, does some or all of the finding, deciding and buying that a person used to do by hand. ## More in this hub - [What is WebMCP?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-webmcp) — An emerging, still-early standard that would let an autonomous AI agent discover and call actions directly on a website it visits on its own, without a business or developer configuring a connection ahead of time. - [What is UCP?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-ucp) — Universal Commerce Protocol, the checkout protocol that completes a purchase once an AI agent has already been connected, identified and authorised, handing a business back a confirmed order instead of an unverified promise. - [What is structured data, for AI?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-structured-data-for-ai) — A business's facts held as distinct, checkable fields, availability, price, terms, rather than as prose an AI agent has to read and interpret to extract the same information. - [What is MCP?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-mcp) — Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets an AI agent call into a business's own systems, checking live data or triggering a defined action, the way it would check availability or pull a menu. - [What is Bootcamp?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-bootcamp) — Selfe's eight-week, hands-on programme: Selfe's own team working directly with a business to get its whole Selfe properly configured, on the business's existing systems. - [What is Folio?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-folio) — Selfe's payment layer, the part that confirms an AI agent is authorised to spend on someone's behalf and settles the transaction with the business once it does. - [What is ARD?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-ard) — Agentic Resource Discovery, Selfe's own standard for how an AI agent finds a business's Echo in the first place, complementary to UCP rather than competing with it. - [What is AP2?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-ap2) — Agent Payments Protocol, a standard for proving that a real person authorised an AI agent to spend a specific amount, so a business can verify that before it charges anything. - [What is an Echo?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-an-echo) — Selfe's structured representation of a business, the specific, verified facts an AI agent checks, kept separate from the website copy written for a browsing person. - [What is an AI agent?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-an-ai-agent) — An AI system that's given a goal and works toward it on a person's behalf, rather than one that just answers whatever's typed into it, turn by turn. - [What is an agent credential?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-an-agent-credential) — A short-lived, scoped proof that an AI agent is who it claims to be, checked before a business trusts a request enough to act on it. - [What is "agentic"?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-agentic) — A description of behaviour, not a fixed category of product: something is acting agentically in a given moment when it's pursuing a goal on its own initiative, rather than only responding to what it's just been asked. - [What is ACP?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-acp) — Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open checkout standard, associated with OpenAI and Stripe, for an AI agent to complete a purchase directly inside a conversation rather than sending the shopper off to a separate website. - [What is A2A?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-a2a) — Agent2Agent protocol, a standard for how one AI agent hands a task to another agent clearly enough that the second one can trust it and act on it. - [What is a Wallet, in the Selfe sense?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-a-wallet-in-the-selfe-sense) — The record of what a specific AI agent is currently authorised to spend, on whose behalf and up to what limit, checked before Folio settles anything against it. - [What is a readiness score?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-a-readiness-score) — A single number summarising how ready a business's facts are for an AI agent to find, trust and act on, measured against the same checks an agent would run. - [What is a Curator?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-a-curator) — The part of Selfe that checks a business's facts against real evidence before they're trusted, weighing a claim differently depending on whether it comes from a verified system or an unverified source. - [What is a buyability check?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-is-a-buyability-check) — A quick, honest read on whether an AI agent could complete a booking or purchase with a business today, checked against its real, current facts. - [What does "agent-ready" mean?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-does-agent-ready-mean) — A business is agent-ready when an AI agent can find its real facts, trust them, and complete a booking or purchase, without a person having to fill in the gaps by hand. - [What counts as a verified fact?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/what-counts-as-a-verified-fact) — A fact an AI agent can trust because it traces back to a real source, a business's own booking system, a supplier feed, a confirmed document, rather than to unverified marketing copy or a crawled page. - [Being found vs being bought from: what's the difference?](https://selfe.ai/insights/glossary/being-found-vs-being-bought-from-whats-the-difference) — Being found means an AI agent knows a business exists and mentions it. Being bought from means the agent can complete a booking or purchase there. The first doesn't guarantee the second. ## Act on this - [Check whether an agent can buy from you](https://selfe.ai/agentic-commerce/buyability-check) — the free readiness scan. - [Discover venues](https://selfe.ai/api/registry/discover) — `POST`, semantic browse across the registry. - [Match a bookable answer](https://selfe.ai/api/registry/match) — `POST` with dates and party size. - [Verify Selfe's identity](https://selfe.ai/.well-known/did.json) — `did:web:selfe.ai`. - [Agent card](https://selfe.ai/.well-known/agent-card.json) — how to connect over A2A or MCP.