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Read the Index

Research

Notes from the front desk.

Field notes, the layers, the channels and the standards — working notes from the front desk, written as the instruments report.

Field notes

What changed this week for anyone who answers a phone, a chat or a form. Launches, blocks, disclosures and what they mean for the front desk.

3 notes

The layers

Reading, acting, human-proxy, adversarial. How each layer behaves, how it shows up on a channel, and how it gets labelled.

1 note

The channels

Phone, web, chat and forms — what each one can carry, what it cannot, and what an instrument on it reads.

1 note

Standards

The open standards that already answer part of the question — agent identity, call attestation, mandates, challenges — read closely.

1 note

Latest

All notes, newest first.

  1. Standards24 Sep 2026What a signed agent request looks like on the wireWeb Bot Auth is how an assistant identifies itself to a website: three headers, an Ed25519 key, and a directory where the key is published. Here is what to read, and how the Index counts it.3 min
  2. Channels24 Sep 2026Twenty-eight times baseline: the crawler surge that followed MuseThe day after Muse shipped, Meta's indexing crawler went from 725 hits a day across our monitored sites to a peak of 20,177. What the surge was, what it was not, and what it cost.3 min
  3. Layers24 Sep 2026The third kind of caller: a person on the line, an agent on the briefMuse's first calls were placed by people reading an assistant's script. A phone label that stops at bot or human cannot describe that caller, so ours does not stop there.4 min
  4. Field notes24 Sep 2026Agents have started signing their requests. A signature is not a pass.Four operators' signed requests reached the Index's sites on the first day of Edition 002: xAI's Grok Bot, Exa, DuckDuckGo and Ahrefs. What a signature proves, and what it leaves to you.4 min
  5. Field notes24 Sep 2026Amazon blocked Muse and said why. The reasons read like a spec.The largest merchant on earth refused the largest new agent, and its two stated reasons are the same two things a small business needs from an agent lane.3 min
  6. Field notes24 Sep 2026Muse made the inquiry free. Here is what lands on the front desk.Meta's Muse closed the checkout side of agent commerce in two weeks. The part that has not been priced is what its inquiries do to the businesses that answer them.3 min