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The AXG edge adapter is the managed content path for public blogs, guides, and documentation. It leaves the customer’s useful page intact and adds only publisher-approved temporal and task-guide navigation:
  • one stale article can carry a fixed one-year calendar-date index (or a legacy ISO-week index);
  • the selected date resolves in one hop to the applicable immutable edition;
  • a current edition can expose a closed set of task guides; and
  • a selected guide can emit bounded task-intent evidence without retaining a prompt, response, cookie, IP address, or full user agent.
This is a delivery mechanism, not evidence that a provider escaped a proprietary cache or that AEO results improved. Measure answer behavior separately before and after activation.

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Required safety contract

Every install must have:
  • a different HTTPS upstream origin so the edge cannot recurse;
  • explicit include paths and narrower provider route bindings;
  • an isolated provider preview and no-store preview responses;
  • no forwarding of caller cookies or authorization;
  • streaming enforcement of the decoded one-megabyte response limit;
  • a bounded one-hour-or-less resolver cache policy;
  • an immutable manifest revision and provider deployment version;
  • a tested disabled mode and provider-native rollback; and
  • a closed intent schema with attribution explicitly not established.

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Provider paths

Cloudflare Workers

Bind a Worker Route only to the approved path. Upload a preview version, verify it, then promote or roll back to a previous Worker version.

Vercel

Use Routing Middleware with a narrow matcher. Verify a preview deployment, then promote that exact deployment or roll the alias back.

AWS CloudFront

Use a numbered Lambda@Edge origin-request version on a staging distribution. Origin-response triggers cannot read and transform the upstream body.

Self-hosted Node

Embed @epode/node/axg-node middleware in an existing Express or Node HTTP application, or run the standalone proxy in front of any origin.

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Preview, activate, and reverse

disabled passes through upstream content. preview transforms only requests with the exact Epode-AXG-Preview secret header and makes the response private. active transforms eligible requests from recognized AI traffic in the approved path and leaves X-Epode-AXG-Revision and X-Epode-AXG-Audience response headers for auditing. Configuring the preview token alongside active lets a human tester send the preview header to see the exact agent variant. Cloudflare and Vercel use the private AXG preview header. CloudFront instead runs an active bundle only on a staging distribution and uses an aws-cf-cd-... continuous-deployment header to route approved requests there. Intent-choice responses are always private and no-store so a selected task is not replayed from a shared cache. Safe fail-open responses include only a bounded X-Epode-AXG-Fallback stage, never an exception or secret. Before activation, verify the original page, every date resolver, every task choice, excluded paths, unsafe methods, origin failure, and intent-sink failure. Then promote the exact tested provider version. A rollback must restore native origin bytes, not merely hide the injected navigation in CSS or JavaScript.

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AI-traffic gating and content parity

Injected navigation reaches only declared AI traffic. The runtime classifies the request’s User-Agent against the documented first-party tokens (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, and Google’s AI fetchers). A matching token is spoofable and is therefore only a claim: it widens what a response advertises, never what a caller is authorized to do. Everything else — human browsers, unknown clients, and deliberately the classic search indexers Googlebot, GoogleOther, and bingbot — receives the page byte-identical to the upstream origin. That parity is the cloaking stance: what ranks the page in a classic index is exactly what a human sees, and the agent variant only ever adds publisher-authored navigation on top of the same underlying content, publicly documented here and in the protocol. Never place answer facts, prices, or claims in the injected navigation that the human page does not carry. Explicit graph URLs — /_epode/ freshness and answer routes, date resolvers, and task-guide pages — still render their content for every audience, so a URL an agent cited stays shareable with humans. They render without the index navigation, and bounded task-intent evidence is retained only for the recognized-agent audience, never from a human visit to a shared link. Because one URL now serves two representations, every transformed or relayed in-scope response carries Vary: User-Agent. Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Middleware run before their shared caches, so the origin body may cache normally while injection happens per request. On CloudFront, the Lambda@Edge generated response is cached by the distribution: include the User-Agent header in the cache policy key (or disable caching on the AXG behavior) so an agent variant is never served to a human, or the reverse. A self-hosted Node deployment usually has no shared cache in front; if you add one, apply the same User-Agent cache-key rule.

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Self-hosted Node

Hosts without a programmable CDN edge — an Express app on a VM, a container platform, or an internal reverse proxy — install the same runtime through @epode/node/axg-node. The embedded middleware hands everything except a recognized transform to the application untouched, so human traffic, unsafe methods, and out-of-scope paths keep byte-identical native behavior, and the raw content for a transform is fetched back from the same application over a loopback subrequest that carries a per-process recursion guard:
createNodeAxgHandler(runtime) instead runs a dedicated proxy process in front of a separate HTTPS upstream origin — the same contract as the CDN adapters. Rollback is configuration: redeploy with mode: "disabled" (or remove the middleware) and the application serves its native bytes again. A failed loopback subrequest answers 502 with private, no-store; it never falls through to the stale native page for a recognized agent, and never leaks an exception. Agentic browsers that present an ordinary browser User-Agent (operator-style browsing, extensions driving a real Chrome) are indistinguishable from humans by design and receive the human page. Do not compensate with UA-resemblance heuristics; if a provider ships a verifiable identity signal such as Web Bot Auth, prefer verifying it over widening the token roster. Run the multicloud AXG edge example