Start with one rooftop, six reads, and a measurable truth set.

Publish the retail truth you want agents to repeat.

A dealer adoption does not begin with granting DMS access. It begins by defining which published vehicles, prices, fees, incentives, and availability sources are approved for agent use.

1. 1Name the owners

   Assign authority for inventory, pricing, incentives, and availability.

2. 2Set the boundary

   Choose rooftop scope, public versus authenticated access, freshness limits, and rate limits.

3. 3Test the answers

   Review what an agent says for in-stock, sold, stale, fee-heavy, and conditionally discounted vehicles.

Success looks like

Agents stop inventing a single “best price,” distinguish published availability from verified availability, and attach source and freshness to claims.

Put a stable contract in front of the systems you already connect.

Inventory, website, pricing, and retail technology providers can implement the gateway as an adapter layer. The protocol does not dictate the internal source architecture.

1. 1Map canonical fields

   Translate source identifiers, money, vehicle facts, offer conditions, provenance, and timestamps.

2. 2Implement the bundle

   Expose all four core profiles and six read tools for minimum interoperability.

3. 3Validate behavior

   Run schema and conformance checks, then document any extensions without changing core semantics.

Integrate once, then reason from explicit semantics.

Agents use MCP for transport and Dealer Agent Protocol for meaning. The manifest tells a client which profiles are available before it calls the tools.

1. 1Discover first

   Read the manifest and dealer identity; do not infer capability from a domain or tool name.

2. 2Treat strength differently

   Search availability is a discovery signal. The verification tool is authoritative within its validity window.

3. 3Disclose, do not collapse

   Never silently combine universal prices, conditional offers, and unknown government charges.

A four-stage path from evaluation to public endpoint.

1. 01Explore

   Use the synthetic reference gateway and inspect the human documentation.

2. 02Map

   Connect one approved data set behind a private gateway environment.

3. 03Verify

   Run conformance checks and human answer reviews across edge cases.

4. 04Publish

   Advertise the endpoint, manifest, supported profiles, access policy, and current draft version.