# Intent routing explained — Agent Delivery Network — ADN

← Back to Help Most sites treat all machine traffic the same: block it, or serve everyone HTML. ADN asks a different question — what is this machine trying to do? — and serves the response shape that job needs.
 The nine intent classes
 Classification uses behaviour signals, user-agent heuristics, and verified bot categories — not credentials alone.
 Bulk training crawlers
 Who: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Bytespider
 What they want: Entire site content for model training
 Response shape: Bulk corpus export + delta feed
 GET /llms-full.txt HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: GPTBot/1.0 → 200 OK, full corpus with navigation index
 Live user-triggered fetches
 Who: ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User, Claude-User
 What they want: A specific page, right now — a user asked an AI to check your pricing
 Response shape: Fast Markdown or DocLang (latency-critical, never rate-limited)
 GET /pricing.dclg HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: ChatGPT-User/1.0
Accept: application/vnd.doclang.document+xml → 200 OK, structured DocLang in <200ms
 Alternatively, request Markdown:
 GET /pricing.md HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: ChatGPT-User/1.0
Accept: text/markdown → 200 OK, clean Markdown in <200ms
 Developer and IDE agents
 Who: Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot
 What they want: Structured access to docs and APIs for code context
 Response shape: MCP tools + Markdown + llms.txt navigation
 POST /mcp/v1 HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
{"method": "tools/call", "params": {"name": "search_content", "arguments": {"query": "auth"}}} → Structured search results, not raw HTML
 Legacy SEO and social
 Who: Googlebot, facebookexternalhit, Slackbot
 What they want: Unmodified HTML for indexing and link previews
 Response shape: Passthrough untouched (hard safety rule)
 This is non-negotiable. Serving Markdown to Googlebot would break SEO.
 Five response shapes
 Shape When Format
 Passthrough Legacy SEO/social bots Unmodified origin HTML
 Markdown Live fetches, IDE agents Clean text/markdown
 DocLang Live fetches, structured parsers XML (.dclg) with semantic elements
 Bulk corpus Training crawlers llms-full.txt + delta feed
 MCP tools Developer agents JSON-RPC over HTTP
 Blocked Abusive traffic 403 with machine-readable reason
 The classification pipeline
 1. Hard safety rule — Googlebot, OG unfurlers → passthrough immediately
 2. Verified bot signals — Cloudflare verified bot category maps to intent class
 3. User-agent heuristics — 200+ signatures in the fixture corpus
 4. Behaviour scoring — rate, path diversity, robots.txt honouring, 304 respect
 5. Declared intent — optional X-ADP-Intent header (gateway may override)
 Anonymous curl and Scrapy requests get graded by behaviour, not blocked.
 Graceful degradation
 When policy limits apply, ADN degrades in order — never walls without explanation:
 1. Full content
 2. Summary + link to full version
 3. Sample + machine-readable terms
 4. 429 Too Many Requests with retry-after
 5. 403 Forbidden with upgrade instructions
 Every degradation response includes a path to better access — register your agent, accept terms, upgrade identity tier.
 See it on your site
 Run the free efficiency scan at https://www.agent-delivery.network to see which intent classes are hitting your site today, what response shape they'd get, and how many tokens you're wasting on HTML.
 Ready to deploy? https://app.agent-delivery.network/login?intent=signup
 Ask ADN