Headless Domains vs Agent Community DMV and AID

Your agent needs a name people can remember and other agents can look up. At HeadlessDomains.com, you can register a live .agent name today and connect it to the service you run.

Search for .agent and you'll also find Agent Community's DMV and AID. All three talk about agent names, but they give you different things. Headless Domains gives you a live public name - an identity that works with your agents, available for registration and use on the agentic web since April, 2026. DMV issues a certificate acknowledging pre-registration interest, while AID helps software find an agent through a domain you already control.

Give your agent a public name today: naming for the agentic web

Suppose your support agent answers setup questions for customers. Someone recommends it to a colleague, or wants their own assistant to find it. A Headless Domains name gives them a public reference to look up, with records pointing to the service you run.

Use those records to describe the agent's job and point to its official service, with public information about who operates it. Compatible software can read the records too. Keep your chosen model and hosting; the name connects callers to the service you maintain.

The support agent will change as you learn what customers need. New tools, a different model, a better place to run it. Keep the name registered and its records current, and those changes can happen behind the same public identity.

Headless Domains names use Handshake, a naming system, designed to be fully backwards compatible with the existing legacy DNS infrastructure, separate from ICANN's patrimony DNS. Headless Domains and SkyInclude maintain the tools and APIs that let agents look up those names and read their public records. Agents can use that infrastructure directly.

The .agent registration guide explains how to choose a name and begin. For a practical example of naming around a useful job, read a name for the tool you keep reaching for.

DMV records interest in Agent Community's ICANN bid

Agent Community's Department of Machine Verification, or DMV, offers a free pre-registration process. You submit a requested .agent name and operator details, then receive a certificate ID and a page you can share.

The certificate acknowledges that pre-registration. Agent Community's own registration terms explain that the request records interest without reserving or assigning the name. Its application to operate .agent in ICANN's legacy DNS still has to move through ICANN's process.

Headless Domains already offers working .agent registration today. You can use this already live DNS naming system right now while the ICANN applicants pursue their bids. Read 13 Bids for .agent. Is ICANN's .agent The Next .web?, for the wider story, including one applicant’s estimate of a potential five-year wait before the Agent Community or, another applicant, gets first access to ICANN’s .agent through the legacy DNS. 

For an extreme example of how long a contested ICANN namespace can take, consider .web: just seven organizations competed for it (compare that to this ICANN round's .agent, with 13 organization competing for it), yet it took .web roughly 14 years from application to entry into the DNS root. As of October 19, 2026, .web still isn’t available for public registration.

AID helps software find a service on an existing domain

Agent Identity & Discovery, or AID, handles another part of the job. If you already control a domain, you can add a discovery record that tells compatible software where to find your agent and how to connect.

Think of it as publishing directions in the domain's records. A client that supports AID reads those directions and gets the service address. AID can also help compatible software check that it has reached the service identified by the domain's published information.

AID works today, independently of DMV pre-registration. You configure it on a domain you control. For the wider picture of how callers reach an agent's service information, continue to how AI agents find each other.

Compare what you get

Put the name behind useful work

For the support agent, the name should lead to a clear description of the help it offers and a working way to use it. The service handles the conversation and controls access to customer information. The public name gives people and compatible software a consistent way to find that service.

Choose a name tied to the job your agent does. Add a clear description and a working service link, then ask a compatible assistant to look up the name and explain what it finds. The seven steps after registration cover the profile, service links and ongoing care that make the name useful.

Choose the name you want customers to remember. Then spend your time making the service behind it worth coming back to.

Find your .agent name at HeadlessDomains.com. Working with an assistant? Give it the Headless Domains registration and setup instructions to help you get started.

Watch What to Do After Registering a Headless Domain: 7 Next Steps to connect your name to the service you run.