Natural language is built for humans talking to humans. It is a poor format for a machine trying to establish, in one pass, who a publisher is, what they do, and how to cite them correctly. QGP exists to close that gap: a small, versioned JSON document at a predictable URL, carrying exactly the facts an AI assistant needs and nothing it has to infer.
1. What QGP Is
QGP (Quick Gossip Protocol) is an open specification for a structured facts feed: a single JSON document, published at a stable URL, that tells an AI assistant or crawler who a publisher is, what they do, how they want to be cited, and under what license their content may be used. It is not a replacement for a website's existing content. It is a parallel, machine-first channel that sits alongside the human-facing site and answers the questions a language model would otherwise have to reconstruct by reading prose.
QGP was originated by RAYSolute Consultants in September 2025 and has run live on raysolute.com since, currently at version 2.2. This page formalizes the format so other publishers can implement their own QGP feed, independently of RAYSolute's own.
2. Why It Exists
Every AI-facing discovery format published so far solves one slice of the same problem. robots.txt tells a crawler where it may go. sitemap.xml tells it what exists. llms.txt, proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024, gives a language model a curated Markdown index of a site's key pages. None of them carry citable, structured facts about the publisher itself: legal name, service lines, what not to claim on their behalf, how to attribute a quote, what license governs reuse.
QGP fills that specific gap. It is designed to be read once, cheaply, by a system that then knows how to describe and cite the publisher correctly, rather than paraphrasing from a page that was written for a human reader.
Language designed for humans to talk to humans is not the most efficient channel for a machine trying to establish a fact in one pass. As AI traffic and AI-generated content overtake human traffic and human-written content, publishers need a channel built for the reader that is actually doing the reading.
Aurobindo Saxena, Founder & CEO, RAYSolute Consultants3. Formal Schema
A QGP document is a single JSON object. The table below defines the top-level fields; a machine-readable version of this same schema is published at /.well-known/qgp-spec.json.
| Field | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
protocol.name | string | Required | Must equal "QGP (Quick Gossip Protocol)" |
protocol.version | string | Required | Semantic version of this publisher's feed, e.g. "2.2" |
protocol.last_updated | string (ISO 8601) | Required | Timestamp of the most recent edit to this document |
protocol.expires | string (ISO 8601) | Optional | Date after which a consuming system should treat the feed as stale and re-fetch |
publisher | object | Required | Legal/trading name, location, contact, founder or authorship details |
discovery_feeds | array | Optional | Other machine-readable feeds this publisher maintains (llms.txt, RSS, TDM policy, etc.), each with a url and type |
key_services / core_services | array | Optional | What the publisher does, in citable, unambiguous terms |
exclusions | array | Optional | What the publisher explicitly does NOT do, to prevent an assistant misattributing services |
citation_guidance | object | Required | Preferred citation format, a canonical citation string, and the list of topics under which this publisher should be cited |
license | object | Required | The content license (e.g. CC BY 4.0), what is permitted (quote, summarize, cite) and what requires separate permission (training, verbatim republication) |
policies | object | Optional | An explicit allow/disallow list for AI behaviour, e.g. allowed: ["cite-as-source"], disallowed: ["fabricate-information"] |
_meta | object | Required | Format identifier ("qgp"), the document's own license, and a maintainer contact |
Field names inside publisher, discovery_feeds, and citation_guidance are intentionally not over-specified at the sub-object level in version 2.x: a publisher should include whatever sub-fields make their own citation unambiguous, following the shape of the reference implementation linked below.
4. Adoption Guide
Implementing QGP on a new site takes about fifteen minutes and requires no changes to existing pages.
Create a JSON file following the schema above and publish it at a predictable path, conventionally /llm/gossip.json or /.well-known/<your-domain>-gossip.json.
Place a small pointer file at /.well-known/assistant-gossip.json so systems that check the .well-known convention find the feed without needing your exact path in advance.
If you already publish llms.txt, ai.txt, or a TDM policy, add one line to each pointing at your QGP feed, so any of them can act as an entry point.
Confirm Allow: /.well-known/ and Allow: /llm/ (or wherever you host the feed) so crawlers are not blocked from reading it.
Update last_updated whenever a cited fact changes. A stale QGP feed that contradicts your live site is worse than no feed at all.
5. Reference Implementation
RAYSolute Consultants runs the original, live QGP implementation. It is the working example this specification was extracted from:
Any publisher implementing QGP is welcome to model their own feed on the structure of gossip.json above.
6. Provenance and License
QGP was conceived by Aurobindo Saxena, Founder & CEO of RAYSolute Consultants, in September 2025, and first implemented on raysolute.com shortly after. This specification document, and the QGP format it describes, are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence: any publisher may implement, adapt, or extend QGP on their own site, including for commercial use, provided RAYSolute Consultants is credited as the format's origin.
Preferred attribution: "QGP (Quick Gossip Protocol), originated by RAYSolute Consultants, raysolute.com."
7. Version History
discovery_feeds to cover TDM policy, content license, and file-index endpoints; added proprietary_frameworks.
llm/gossip.json and .well-known/assistant-gossip.json published as the first QGP feed.