Papers

One pass over 10,000 Tranco domains. In October 2026 a self-declaring crawler visited each domain once, under a protocol frozen before any request. Weighted to the top million, 11.9% of sites with robots.txt rules name and refuse at least one AI crawler, 9.2% of domains publish a valid invitation file or signal, and 22.8% of files with rules carry a platform's default text. The policy file was answered for a browser string but not for the research identity on 2.4% of sites, against 0.8% the other way. All six pre-registered tests fall below the Bonferroni threshold.

AI agents can finish a conversation without establishing that shared work is complete. This report proposes an evidence-bound completion contract: each claim identifies an immutable artifact, an applicable validation policy, and a receiver-accepted result. It separates execution, verification, acceptance, and publication, specifies failure and recovery behavior, and examines stale evidence, concurrent edits, and authority boundaries. A reproducible model tests explicit protocol assumptions without treating simulated outcomes as measured production performance.