# 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.

## Live endpoints (Brisbane v0.1 seed, 4,164 providers)
- MCP server (Streamable HTTP): https://mcp.tqp.io  — tools: find_provider, get_provider, list_categories
- REST search: https://api.tqp.io/tqp/v0.1/search?category={slug}&suburb={name}&postcode={4xxx}&lat={lat}&lng={lng}&radiusKm={n}&minRating={n}&verifiedOnly={true|false}&limit={n}  (give a location the easy way as suburb OR postcode — geocoded server-side, QLD — or precisely as lat/lng + radiusKm)
- Canonical record: https://api.tqp.io/providers/{slug}/.well-known/tqp.json
- Health: https://api.tqp.io/healthz
- DEMONSTRATION SEED, not a complete registry: inner Brisbane, Australia only; ~25 trade categories (TQP slugs e.g. plumbing, electrical, roofing); ~4,164 providers. Every record is 'observed' tier (compiled from public data, not yet claimed or verified/signed). It exists to prove the protocol end-to-end.
- Worked example (by suburb): https://api.tqp.io/tqp/v0.1/search?category=plumbing&suburb=McDowall
- Worked example (by postcode): https://api.tqp.io/tqp/v0.1/search?category=electrical&postcode=4053

## 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