opuscript.com/standard · Version 1.0 · Free to adopt

An open standard · self-assessed at Tiers 1 and 2

You cannot control what a machine says about you. You can control what it finds.

The Answer-Engine Conformance Standard defines the practices that remove the causes of the errors AI assistants make about businesses — absence, misstatement, staleness, confusion. It certifies your practices, not your results, because nobody honest can certify your results.

Assess your business free See the tiers

Why a standard, and why this one certifies practices

A customer asks an assistant who to hire. The assistant assembles an answer from whatever it can find — your site, your listings, directories, press, and material about businesses with names like yours. When it gets you wrong, it is almost never malicious and almost always because the source material was absent, contradictory, or years out of date.

Those causes are controllable. Whether a model then reflects the correction is not.

So this standard draws a hard line that most of this field refuses to draw. It certifies the practices, never the outcome. It is the same logic as a food-safety standard, which certifies that procedures are in place rather than promising nobody will fall ill. A business that conforms has removed the removable causes. That is a real, checkable, valuable claim — and it is the only one available that is honest.

Stated before anything else

Conformance with this standard does not mean AI assistants will mention your business, recommend it, or describe it correctly. No standard, product or practitioner can deliver that, and any that claims to is selling something that does not exist.

What conformance means is narrower and true: you maintain a canonical public record of your own facts, you know where those facts appear off your domain, you keep them current, and you have stated what you do not do. If an engine still gets you wrong after that, the cause is not something you were in a position to fix.

This is not a readiness scorecard

There are several tools that will grade your website for AI search and hand you a number. There is also at least one proprietary certification framework in this space. Neither is what this is, and the difference is worth being precise about before you spend time here.

	Readiness scorecards	Proprietary certification	This standard
What it grades	Your website's structure — headings, schema, parseability.	Observed AI behaviour: citation frequency, trust persistence.	Your practices: canonical record, source enumeration, currency, boundaries.
What it promises	Better extraction, usually implied rather than stated.	Qualification for visibility and citation in answer engines.	Nothing about outcomes. Explicitly, in writing, in §1.
Who can publish it	The vendor whose tool generated it.	The body that owns the framework.	Anyone. Self-assessed at Tiers 1 and 2, free, no permission needed.
Who can assess	The vendor's software.	The framework's owner.	You, at Tiers 1–2. Any certified assessor at Tier 3, including ones who compete with us.
Public register	No.	Generally not.	Yes, and any person may challenge any entry.
Licence	Proprietary; the score belongs to the tool.	Proprietary.	CC BY 4.0. Fork it, require it, build tooling for it.
Cost to conform	Usually a subscription.	Programme fees.	Nothing at Tiers 1 and 2.

The row that matters is the second one. A framework that certifies citation frequency or trust persistence is certifying something nobody controls — model behaviour that changes without notice and varies by user, region and session. When it stops being true, the certificate does not know. This standard refuses that trade deliberately, which makes it a smaller claim and the only one that stays true.

The test to apply to any of them, including this one

Ask what happens to the claim when the model updates. If the certification was about your practices, nothing happens — the practices are still in place and the claim is still accurate. If it was about your visibility, the certificate is now describing a state of affairs that may no longer exist, and neither you nor the certifier will be told.

Four classes of evidence

Each class exists to prevent specific error classes found by audits under the Answer-Engine Audit Method. They are not arbitrary categories — they are the four things that, when missing, produce nearly every correctable error.

Class I

The Record

A single canonical public statement of what the business is and does — the source of truth every other listing must agree with.

Legal and trading name, and any former names
What is sold, in the words a customer would use
Where it operates and where it is registered
Price bands or ranges with a stated date
Credentials, registrations and licence numbers
Named individuals responsible

Class II

The Sources

The places off the business's own domain where those facts appear. Engines draw mostly from here, not from your website.

Every directory, profile and listing enumerated
Third-party references and press, dated
Which sources the business controls and which it does not
Known incorrect sources and what has been done about them

Class III

The Currency

Evidence that the record is current rather than merely present. Staleness is the most common correctable error found in audits.

Date the record was last reviewed in full
A stated review interval
A change log of what was corrected and when
Removal of superseded claims, not just addition of new ones

Class IV

The Boundaries

What the business does not do, and how it differs from entities with similar names. This is the only defence against being merged with somebody else.

Services explicitly not offered
Areas not served
Named similar entities and the distinction
Discontinued lines and when they ended

Class	Prevents
The Record	E1 Absence and E5 Omission — an engine cannot state what nobody has written down.
The Sources	E1 Absence and E6 Framing — presence off-domain is what engines actually draw on.
The Currency	E3 Staleness and E2 Misstatement — the cheapest errors to fix and the most common to find.
The Boundaries	E4 Confusion — the hardest error class to correct after the fact, and the only one prevention really helps.

E7 Fabrication is deliberately absent from that table. A detail invented with no traceable source cannot be prevented by publishing better source material, and this standard does not pretend otherwise.

Three tiers of conformance

Tiers escalate by evidence, not by quality of business. A large company with a thin record is Declared; a two-person practice with a complete one is Maintained. Only Tier 3 requires anyone else's involvement.

DeclaredTier 1 · Self-assessed

The canonical record exists, is public, and covers all four classes. The minimum honest claim.

Class I complete and published at a stable URL
Class II: every controlled source enumerated
Class III: a review date within the last twelve months
Class IV: at least the services-not-offered statement
The conformance declaration signed by a named person

MaintainedTier 2 · Self-assessed

Adds machine-readability and a real review cycle. This is the tier most businesses should target.

Everything in Declared
Structured data published for the organisation, its services and its prices
A stated review interval of six months or less, and evidence of at least one completed review
Class II: uncontrolled sources checked and corrections attempted, with outcomes recorded
Class IV complete, including named similar entities

VerifiedTier 3 · Independently assessed

Adds an independent assessment against the Answer-Engine Audit Method by a certified assessor within the preceding twelve months.

Everything in Maintained
A completed audit under the Answer-Engine Audit Method v1.0
The audit's error findings addressed or an explicit statement of why not
Assessment performed by an assessor certified under this standard
Entry in the public register with the assessment date

Tiers 1 and 2 cost nothing and require nobody's permission. Do the work, sign the declaration, display the mark at the tier you reached. That is deliberate: a standard only becomes worth anything through adoption, and charging for adoption is the fastest way to prevent it.

The conformance declaration

Reproduce this wording exactly. A claim made with altered wording does not conform — the value of a standard phrase is that it means one thing everywhere it appears.

Conformance declaration — Answer-Engine Conformance Standard v1.0

I have assessed this business against the Answer-Engine Conformance Standard version 1.0 and it meets the requirements of the tier stated below. The canonical record is published and current as at the date given, the sources listed are complete to the best of my knowledge, and the boundaries stated are accurate. I understand that this declaration concerns our practices and makes no claim about what any AI assistant says about us.

Signed Name
Business Tier claimed
Record URL Date assessed

What voids a conformance claim

Claiming a tier whose requirements the record does not meet.
A canonical record that is not publicly reachable at a stable address.
A review date stated as more recent than the review actually performed.
Omitting a source known to the business to carry incorrect information about it.
Altering the declaration wording while still citing this standard.
Displaying the mark without the tier, the version, and the assessment date.
Any statement, anywhere, that conformance implies an AI assistant will mention or recommend the business.

The mark

Conformant businesses may display the mark at the tier reached. It must always appear with the tier, the standard version, and the date of assessment — a mark without a date is a claim about an unspecified past.

Tier 1 · Declared

Tier 2 · Maintained

Tier 3 · Verified

On light ground

Accompany the mark with a link to your canonical record and to this standard, so a reader can check the claim rather than take it. Mark files and the exact accompanying text are on the self-assessment page, issued when you complete an assessment.

Governance

Who maintains this

The standard is written and maintained by CIONAOD Inc. It is not a consortium and does not pretend to be one. That is a weakness of a young standard and is stated rather than disguised.

Versioning

Requirements change only on a major version. Clarifications that do not alter what must be done are issued as minor versions. Conformance claims cite the version assessed against, and a claim against a superseded version remains valid for twelve months after the successor is published.

Amendment

Proposed changes are published for comment for thirty days before adoption, with the comments and the response published alongside. Anyone may propose a change; there is no membership. Write to standard@opuscript.com.

Challenge and removal

Any person may challenge a published conformance claim by writing to challenge@opuscript.com with the specific requirement they believe is unmet. The business is notified, given thirty days to correct or respond, and the outcome is recorded in the register. Registry entries are removed for unresolved challenges, and the removal is recorded rather than erased.

Conflict of interest

CIONAOD Inc. both maintains this standard and sells assessments against it. That is a real conflict. It is mitigated by keeping Tiers 1 and 2 free and self-assessed, by publishing the requirements in full so anyone can assess without us, and by certifying independent assessors who compete with us for Tier 3 work. It is not eliminated, and you should weigh it.

Questions about the standard

Does conformance mean AI assistants will recommend my business?

No, and any standard claiming otherwise would be dishonest. Answer engines are non-deterministic and no one controls what they say. Conformance means you have done the controllable things — published a canonical record, enumerated your sources, kept it current, and stated your boundaries. It removes the causes of the errors that are removable. It does not promise a result.

What does it cost to conform?

Nothing. The standard is published free and Tiers 1 and 2 are self-assessed — you can conform this afternoon at no cost by doing the work and signing the declaration. Only Tier 3 Verified requires a paid independent assessment, because independence is the thing being bought.

Who checks a self-assessed claim?

Nobody, automatically. Tiers 1 and 2 are self-declared, exactly as they are in most published standards. What backs them is a named person's signature and a public record that anyone can inspect and challenge. A false claim is not caught by a system; it is caught by a customer reading the record.

How is this different from the Answer-Engine Audit Method?

The Method is how you measure what assistants currently say — an instrument. The Standard is what a business maintains so that what they say is accurate and findable — a set of practices. You can be measured without conforming, and you can conform without ever being measured. Tier 3 is where the two meet.

Can I use the mark if I only self-assess?

Yes, at the tier you have actually reached, displayed with the version and the assessment date. Displaying a tier you have not met voids the claim and is the one thing that would get an entry removed from the register.

Why publish this free instead of selling it?

Because a standard nobody adopts is a pamphlet. Its value comes entirely from being used and cited by people who paid nothing for it. The revenue is in independent assessment and assessor certification, and both of those only exist if the standard is widely adopted first.

Free to adopt

Published open under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. Any business, agency, association or platform may adopt, cite, require, or build tooling for this standard without permission, fee, or notification.

Cite it as OPUSCRIPT AEC v1.0. The short form carries the distinctiveness and the expansion stays descriptive, which is how ISO 9001, WCAG 2.2 and C2PA all work — the identifier is ownable, the description is not, and neither can be quietly appropriated. A conformance claim that cites only “an answer engine standard” is unverifiable and therefore worthless.

The declaration wording in §5, the tier definitions in §4, and the limits in §1 must not be altered while the standard's name is used — particularly the limits. A version of this standard with the limits removed is the exact thing it was written to displace. Fork it under another name if you need different terms.

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