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Description
Problem Statement
AX Score currently recommends creating an ai-plugin.json manifest and hosting it at /.well-known/ai-plugin.json. However, ChatGPT Plugins were fully deprecated and shut down in April 2024.
Timeline:
- March 19, 2024: Users could no longer start new plugin conversations
- April 9, 2024: All plugin-based chats were permanently disabled
- Replacement: ChatGPT Plugins were replaced by Custom GPTs with Actions, which use a completely different mechanism
The ai-plugin.json format is officially dead. No AI system currently reads or utilizes this file. Recommending it to users is misleading and wastes their development time on implementing a defunct standard.
References:
- OpenAI Community: Have plugins been replaced completely?
- ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin - Deprecated Docs (GitHub)
- Your Everyday AI: ChatGPT is Killing Off Plugins
Proposed Solution
- Remove
ai-plugin.jsonfrom the scoring criteria and recommendations entirely - Replace it with more relevant AI discoverability checks:
llms.txtdetection (emerging standard, documented at llmstxt.org)- Enhanced JSON-LD structured data analysis (WebSite, Article, Person, BreadcrumbList schemas)
- RSS/Atom feed detection
- AI crawler allowance in robots.txt (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, etc.)
Alternatives Considered
- Keep but lower weight: Not recommended — the spec is literally dead with no consumers.
- Replace with MCP (Model Context Protocol): Could be relevant for API services but too niche for general scoring.
Use Case
As a website owner running npx ax-score, I want the recommendations to reflect currently active standards, not deprecated ones. Implementing ai-plugin.json today provides zero benefit to AI discoverability.
Additional Context
This is arguably a bug rather than a feature request, since the tool is recommending a discontinued standard. Prioritizing this fix would improve the tool's credibility.