Quickstart

Start in the AEO workspace. Defining the market and reviewing the query portfolio does not require a website migration or a customer-side integration. Then collect company-owned traffic and outcome evidence as separate layers. Product-wide totals are not attributed to AEO until referral or session linkage exists. The technical example below uses Express for permissioned customer context and business outcomes. The same company-layer contract is available for Fastify, MCP, and any backend that can send HTTPS JSON. For a merchant-authored agent journey, see Agent experience graph.

Define your AI market

Create the product in Epode, open AEO, and enter the public market truth: brand, primary domain, audience, topics, and competitors. Epode builds discovery, evaluation, decision, and head-to-head queries from those inputs. Customer prompts and private conversations are not imported.

Review the evidence ladder

Confirm that the query portfolio covers the buying journey. The dashboard labels answer visibility as synthetic evidence, crawler and referral data as observed traffic, confirmed agent behavior as protocol evidence, and business results as company evidence. A collection layer that is not connected remains marked as not running.

Connect first-party evidence

Copy the product’s shown-once server key into your secret manager:

EPODE_API_KEY=af_live_...

Never put this key in browser code, a mobile app, an agent configuration, source control, or logs.

Install Epode once

npm install @epode/node express

import express from "express";
import { epode } from "@epode/node/express";

const app = express();
app.use(express.json());
app.use(issueOrVerifyFirstPartyVisitor);

const customer = epode({
  apiKey: process.env.EPODE_API_KEY,
  include: ["/api/recommendations"],
  purpose: "product_personalization",
  authenticate: authenticateProductRequest,
  identify: req => ({
    accountRef: req.user?.accountId,
    userRef: req.user?.id,
    anonymousRef: req.firstPartyVisitorId,
  }),
});

app.use(customer);

This one middleware also mounts the company-owned /_epode/v1/enrichment/consent and /_epode/v1/enrichment/answers routes. The agent never needs an Epode account, key, plugin, or direct write to an unfamiliar domain. Put rejecting product authentication in the authenticate option—not in middleware above Epode—so the adapter can bypass it only for those two exact, capability-authenticated relay routes.

Use permitted context

app.get("/api/recommendations", async (req, res) => {
  const context = await customer.contextFor(req);

  const products = context.available
    ? rankForCustomer(catalog, context.items)
    : rankNormally(catalog);

  let decisionId;
  if (context.available && context.items.length) {
    const result = await customer.personalization.decide({
      externalDecisionId: crypto.randomUUID(),
      contextRetrievalId: context.retrievalId,
      signalIds: context.items.map(item => item.signalId),
      variant: "customer-context-ranking-v1",
    });
    if (result.recorded) decisionId = result.decision.id;
  }

  res.json({ products, decisionId });
});

contextFor safely combines company-authenticated identity with the bounded ephemeral continuation header, when one exists. It returns an empty, unavailable context instead of failing the product when Epode is down.

Measure the outcome

app.post("/api/orders", async (req, res) => {
  if (req.body.decisionId) {
    await customer.outcomes.track({
      externalOutcomeId: req.order.id,
      decisionId: req.body.decisionId,
      outcome: "conversion",
    });
  }
  res.status(201).json({ orderId: req.order.id });
});

Identical retries are idempotent. A changed retry fails closed instead of rewriting history.

Run a real customer journey

First call the product as a fresh anonymous or known customer. The response preserves the original fields and adds _epode.customerContext. A capable agent finishes the product task, asks only the returned permission question when required, and submits bounded context through the same-origin route. Call the product again and verify that the permitted context changes the result. Finally submit the business outcome.The enrichment lookup is on this selected response path, with a 250 ms timeout by default. The original response is returned unchanged on timeout or failure. Tune timeoutMs to your latency budget and monitor timeout warnings.

Identity states

What the company has	Send	Behavior
Authenticated account and user	`accountRef` + `userRef`	Verified customer continuity
First-party pre-login visitor	`anonymousRef`	Pseudonymous continuity and remembered permission
Both after sign-in	all applicable references	Deterministic anonymous-to-known resolution
Nothing stable	no reference	Current-interaction context only

For the last row, the response tells the agent to return Epode-Context-Interaction on the immediate retry of that same product operation. customer.contextFor(req) validates and reads it automatically. This handle does not create identity or continuity across unrelated interactions, products, or later visits, and expires with the enrichment request. Use opaque internal IDs from verified company state. Never send names, email addresses, prompts, raw request content, bearer tokens, or agent-supplied identity.

product_personalization permission never authorizes targeted_advertising. Advertising is a separate purpose, question, consent grant, retrieval, and decision trail.

Start here

Understand Epode

HTTP and websites

MCP

Operate

Identity states

​Identity states

Identity states