# What is an Agent Delivery Network? — ADN — ADN

← Back to Learn An Agent Delivery Network (ADN) is a cooperative gateway for machine traffic. Where a CDN optimizes delivery by geography, an ADN optimizes the response shape by intent .
 The problem ADN solves
 Every day, bots, crawlers, and AI agents fetch your site. Most receive the same HTML a browser would — full of navigation chrome, script tags, and layout markup they never render. That wastes tokens, inflates your origin bill, and makes it harder for answer engines to quote you correctly.
 A typical marketing page might ship 40–80 KB of HTML when an agent only needs 4–8 KB of clean content.
 How an ADN works
 1. Classify — Score each request on user agent, published IP ranges, declared identity, and behaviour before your origin is touched.
 2. Route — Map the request into one of nine intent classes (training crawlers, answer engines, IDE agents, commercial scrapers, legacy SEO, and more).
 3. Serve — Return the payload that class matches: bulk corpus export, clean Markdown or DocLang, MCP tools, metered access, or untouched passthrough.
 Ordinary browser HTML stays on your origin. Machine traffic and format requests are classified and served the shape they asked for. Analytics report total traffic and high-confidence machine traffic — not a human vs bot invoice.
 What makes ADN different
 • Per-class workflows — Training crawlers get a bulk corpus, not page-by-page sitemap walks. Live fetchers get fast Markdown or DocLang with honest ETags.
 • Evidence, not a score — ADN shows what each machine visitor actually receives and what it costs in tokens. It is not an "agent readiness" checklist.
 • Search-engine safe — Googlebot and social unfurlers always pass through untouched. That is a hard rule, not a configuration option.
 • Cross-platform — Deploy on Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, or WordPress. The agent layer travels with you.
 When you need an ADN
 • Answer engines cannot read or cite your client-rendered app.
 • Training crawlers walk your sitemap and inflate origin compute.
 • IDE agents scrape your docs because no structured alternative exists.
 • You want analytics that split total vs machine traffic and show which formats were served.
 Try it on your URL
 ADN publishes a free efficiency scan at https://www.agent-delivery.network/#scan. One request, no signup — see what machines get from your site today and how many tokens that wastes.
 Frequently asked
 Is an ADN the same as a CDN? No. A CDN optimizes byte delivery by geography. An ADN optimizes response shape by intent — bulk corpus for training crawlers, Markdown or DocLang for live fetches, MCP tools for IDE agents, and passthrough for search engines.
 Is an ADN a bot manager or WAF? No. Bot managers score risk and block abuse. An ADN classifies intent and serves cooperative machine visitors a better payload than raw HTML — while still blocking truly abusive traffic.
 Continue reading
 Nine intent classes explained
 Agent-friendly vs agent-ready: why we don't sell a score
 Run the free scan on your URL to see what AI receives today.
 Ask ADN