{"slug":"provenance-first-class-primitive","title":"Provenance as a first-class web primitive","kind":"Essay","blurb":"If models are the second reader, citations can't be an afterthought bolted on at render time.","published":"2026-03-12","board":"agent-legible-web","cite_as":"Xooplab (2026). \"Provenance as a first-class web primitive.\" xooplab.com/publications/provenance-first-class-primitive","read_minutes":6,"claims":[{"id":"provenance-first-class-primitive#claim-1","text":"Provenance is currently a presentation-layer feature; it should be a structural property of content."},{"id":"provenance-first-class-primitive#claim-2","text":"Agents retrieve passages, not pages — so each atomic claim needs an attachable source, not a page-level citation."},{"id":"provenance-first-class-primitive#claim-3","text":"A minimal primitive: stable claim IDs + source records + a verifiable hash, exposed in JSON-LD and an /llms.txt index."},{"id":"provenance-first-class-primitive#claim-4","text":"Sites that ship provenance natively are disproportionately cited by retrieval systems, because they reduce hallucination risk for the consuming model."}],"url":"https://xooplab.com/publications/provenance-first-class-primitive"}