Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP)

As agentic commerce grows, merchants face a persistent challenge: telling helpful AI shopping assistants apart from malicious web crawlers. Bot defenses built for the older web often cannot make that distinction, so they block legitimate agent-driven transactions. Merchants also need to recognize the shopper behind the agent – whether that customer has an account or has shopped there before – even when the request arrives from software rather than a browser.

The Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP), launched by Visa in collaboration with Cloudflare in October 2025, answers this with a verifiable, cryptographic standard for recognizing agents. Take a concrete case: a shopper’s AI agent sends a request to a retailer to buy a specific product. The agent attaches a digital signature to that request. The merchant’s server reconstructs the exact string that was signed from the request’s attributes, then checks the signature against the agent’s public key. If it validates, the merchant knows the request is authentic, unaltered, and comes from an approved agent – no guessing required.

The signature carries three things: agent intent – the agent is trusted and intends to look up or buy a specific product; consumer recognition – data indicating whether the shopper has an existing account or prior history with the merchant; and payment information – agents may carry payment data to support the merchant’s preferred checkout method. Under the hood, TAP is built on the HTTP Message Signature standard (RFC 9421), the web standard for cryptographically signing HTTP requests, and is aligned with Web Bot Auth, an emerging standard that lets bots and agents authenticate themselves on the open web. Because it rides on existing web infrastructure, merchants can adopt it with minimal changes to their checkout experience.

Visa states the initial specifications apply to the Visa network in this phase, with the goal of an open, ecosystem-wide approach aligned with standards bodies including IETF, the OpenID Foundation and EMVCo. Visa is incorporating TAP into agentic commerce platform Visa Intelligent Commerce; Cloudflare is extending the underlying Web Bot Auth with Mastercard and American Express; and Visa says TAP is meant to complement other announced efforts such as the Agentic Commerce Protocol while aligning with Coinbase on x402. TAP also sits beside Know Your Agent initiatives: it answers “is this approved agent calling, and with what intent?” at the moment of a request – a different job from the broader vetting and governance of agents.

The most common confusion to clear up: TAP is not the payment step itself. It is the authentication layer that sits in front of checkout, verifying who the agent is and what it intends before the payment flow begins. Once that check passes, the merchant can take payment however it normally does – including payment methods the agent carries on the shopper’s behalf.