The Personal Agent Protocol, explained for store owners Free & Pro

The Personal Agent Protocol is an open standard for how a person’s AI assistant deals with a business on that person’s behalf. It says how the assistant finds out what a business offers, how it proves which assistant it is, how the person signs in and chooses what it may do, and how the business then serves it. A store that implements it is called a Company in the protocol’s own terms. Agent Adapt makes a WooCommerce store one.

Who published it, and when

Sierra and Meta announced the protocol on 6 October 2026, with a group of launch partners that included Walmart, Shopify and Stripe. The first public text, Draft 0.1, appeared on 9 October 2026 at personalagentprotocol.org, under the Apache 2.0 licence. The draft says plainly that any part of it may change before a stable version, including in ways that break earlier implementations.

Agent Adapt is independent. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the protocol’s authors, Sierra, Meta, or any of the launch partners. We implement the published draft, and we say which draft.

The three parties

The specification uses three words throughout, and it helps to know them.

• User. The person. Your customer.
• Personal Agent. Software acting for that person: an assistant in a messaging app, a browser, a phone, a speaker or a car. It belongs to the person, not to you.
• Company. A business that implements the protocol so personal agents can work with it. Your store.

Nothing in the protocol makes the agent the Company’s. That is the point. The agent answers to the customer, and the Company decides what any agent may do.

What the protocol covers

Draft 0.1 has six parts. Four of them matter to a store straight away.

Discovery. A Company publishes one file, /.well-known/poppy.json, at the root of its domain. It names the business, says how agents sign customers in, and lists the APIs and web entry point the business offers. An agent reads it first and learns everything else from there. See What poppy.json is, and what yours says.

Sessions and authorization. This is OAuth 2.0 with a few firm rules. An agent identifies itself with an HTTPS address it controls and signs every request to start a visit. Tokens are bound to a key the agent holds, so a copied token is useless on its own. A visit is called a Session. It starts signed out, and the customer can sign it in to exactly one account. See How your store knows which agent is calling.

Sign-in. The draft describes three ways for a customer to connect an agent to their account. Two send the customer to the business’s own sign-in page, by a link or by a short code. The third, where the agent submits the customer’s credentials itself, is optional for a Company. Agent Adapt offers the first two and not the third. At sign-in the customer grants scopes: poppy:read to view, poppy:write to make changes, plus any the Company defines.

APIs. A Company can offer an OpenAPI-described API, an MCP server, or both. The agent uses whichever it understands. Agent Adapt’s free plugin offers the OpenAPI API; Pro adds an MCP server.

The other two parts are web browsing, where an agent’s own browser joins the Session on the business’s website, and conversations, where the agent talks to the business’s own AI agent. Agent Adapt supports the first. It does not yet offer a Company Agent for the second.

Extensions sit alongside all of this. The draft defines one, operations, for changes that need the customer to approve exact terms before anything happens. Pro implements it for refunds, returns and address changes. Other extensions must be named with a domain their author controls, which is how Agent Adapt’s checkout link is advertised.

What it leaves undecided

The draft’s own open-topics page names three things it does not yet cover:

• Payments. How an agent would pay, and how that would sit beside payment schemes that already exist.
• Push notifications. How a business reaches an agent when no request is open, for example when an order ships.
• Attachments. How a business sends an agent a receipt, a return label or a form.

So under Draft 0.1 an agent does not pay. Agent Adapt handles this with a checkout link: the agent builds the cart, the customer opens the link and pays on your own checkout. See How agent orders reach your checkout.

What it is not

• Not a marketplace or a directory. Nobody lists your store anywhere. An agent finds you because the customer named you, or because it already knew your domain.
• Not a payment scheme. See above.
• Not a way to stop scraping. It gives well-behaved agents a proper door. It does nothing about agents that ignore it.
• Not finished. It is a draft, with a formal 0.1 and a reference implementation expected from its authors. Our changelog records every change we make to follow it.

What it means for a WooCommerce store

If you install Agent Adapt, your store publishes poppy.json, verifies agents, runs the OAuth server the protocol requires, shows the customer a consent page on your own domain, and answers the agent’s API calls with your real catalogue, prices, stock and coupon rules. Your customers can see and disconnect their agents under My Account → Connected agents. You can see and block agents under WooCommerce → Agents.

You do not need to register anywhere or issue keys. The protocol has no central authority. Each business decides which agents it accepts, and each customer decides what their agent may do.

Common questions

Is the Personal Agent Protocol the same as MCP?

No. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a general way to give an AI model tools. The Personal Agent Protocol is about identity, consent and access between a person’s agent and a business. It lists MCP as one of two API types a business may offer, alongside OpenAPI. See Do you need an MCP server for your WooCommerce store?.

Do my customers have to do anything?

Only if they want their agent to use their account. Then their agent sends them to your store’s sign-in page, where they approve it. Browsing, searching and building a cart need no sign-in.

Is it final?

No. Draft 0.1 was published on 9 October 2026 and may change incompatibly. Agent Adapt tracks the published text and records each change it makes in its changelog.

Who checks that a store follows it correctly?

Nobody yet. There is no conformance programme. Agent Adapt’s own test suite plays a real agent against a real store on every release, and we say "implements Draft 0.1", nothing more.

Does it cost anything to take part?

The protocol is free and open under Apache 2.0. Agent Adapt’s plugin is free; Pro adds features and is paid.