# TQP — Trust Qualification Protocol

> An open standard for how AI agents discover, qualify, and trust real-world service providers (tradespeople and service businesses). Built on top of schema.org, A2A, UCP and MCP. Status: v0.1 working draft. Home: https://tqp.io

## What it is
TQP defines the minimum machine-readable description of a service provider sufficient for an autonomous agent to evaluate and recommend it on a person's behalf: identity, credentials (licences, insurance), services, service area, availability (typical response time), pricing, third-party trust signals, and contact/engagement endpoints. Every TQP record is also valid schema.org.

## Why it exists
AI agents can already discover and buy products, but have no standard way to tell whether a tradesperson is licensed, insured, available and trustworthy. Most genuinely good tradies have no Google Business Profile and run on word of mouth, so they are invisible to agents. TQP is a machine-readable proxy for the personal referral — the friend who vouches.

## The six questions a record answers
1. Can they legally and competently do the job? (credentials)
2. Will they cover my problem, where I am? (services, serviceArea)
3. Can they come when I need them? (availability)
4. What will it cost? (pricing)
5. Can I trust them? (trust, insurance)
6. Can my agent engage them now? (contact, engagement)

## The trust model
Records sit on a ladder: observed (compiled from public data) -> claimed (provider confirmed ownership) -> verified (credentials and ratings checked against authoritative sources and cryptographically signed with an expiry, like an SSL certificate). Agents must not treat unsigned trust numbers as verified.

## How an agent uses it
- Query a TQP registry over REST or as an MCP tool, or read a provider's /.well-known/tqp.json directly.
- Records return ranked results with transparent match reasons, so an agent can explain why it recommended someone.

## How a business is listed
Publish a TQP record (registry-hosted, or self-hosted at /.well-known/tqp.json) describing licences, insurance, response time, pricing and reviews.

## Key facts
- Name: Trust Qualification Protocol (TQP)
- Version: 0.1 (working draft)
- Built on: schema.org, Agent2Agent (A2A), Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Licence: schema Apache-2.0 / CC0; spec text CC-BY
- Home: https://tqp.io