Is the AQA Hub really free?

Yes. AQA is an open protocol and the reference Hub at ailabsaudit.com is free to use with no commercial plan attached.

Do I need to register?

No. The Hub is intentionally anonymous — no account, no API key. Just POST the URL you want indexed.

Tutorials

OPEN PROTOCOL

AQA Hub

Notify AI systems when you update your FAQ. Open API, no registration.

AQA Hub Validator

What is the AQA Hub?

The AQA Hub is an open aggregator that connects FAQ publishers with AI systems. When you update your FAQ, you notify the Hub. AI crawlers query the Hub to discover fresh, structured content without waiting for a full recrawl of your site.

Unlike a sitemap or a ping service dedicated to search engines, the Hub is built specifically for generative AI consumers: Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, You.com and any other retrieval-augmented assistant that needs to ground answers in fresh, verifiable sources. The Hub exposes a public stream of structured updates, so those systems can see which FAQ entries changed, when, in which language, and for which market segment.

No registration, no API key. The Hub validates your AQA markup automatically and returns a normalised view of your questions and answers.

Why the AQA Hub exists

Large language models are trained on snapshots of the web that are frequently months or even years old. When users ask these assistants a factual question about your pricing, your return policy, your eligibility criteria or your product specifications, the model often answers from outdated training data. Real-time retrieval helps, but AI crawlers still rely on the same tired plumbing designed for search engines: RSS feeds, sitemap.xml files, and periodic spidering.

A sitemap.xml tells a crawler that a URL exists. It does not tell anyone which questions and answers appear on that page, which ones changed since the last visit, or which audience the content targets. AQA fills that specific gap. It standardises FAQ metadata (question, answer, language, country, sector, author, verification date) and the AQA Hub pushes those updates to AI systems in a predictable, machine-readable format. The Hub is therefore not a competitor to Google or Bing indexing; it is complementary infrastructure designed for the generative AI layer.

Publishers benefit because their freshest factual content reaches AI answer panels with minimal latency. AI systems benefit because they no longer need to guess which pages on your site are authoritative FAQ sources — the Hub tells them exactly where to look.

Who should use it

The AQA Hub is relevant for any organisation that publishes questions and answers on a public website. Four profiles get the most immediate value:

E-commerce and marketplaces — product FAQs, shipping policies, sizing charts, warranty and return terms. A change to a return window or a restocking fee needs to reach Perplexity and ChatGPT quickly, because these assistants are increasingly answering pre-purchase questions.
SaaS and developer tools — pricing tiers, feature eligibility, migration guides, API changelogs. When a free plan quota changes, developers will ask AI assistants before reading the docs.
Media and publishers — editorial FAQs around breaking news, explainer content, fact-checks. A news organisation correcting a story after publication can push the updated Q and A to the Hub within seconds.
Government, institutions and regulated sectors — public service information, legal obligations, administrative procedures, health or safety notices. AQA gives these publishers an authoritative channel to AI assistants that is cheaper and more predictable than press releases.

3 Steps to Get Started

Implement AQA on your FAQ

Add AQA markup (at least Basic level). See the AQA Standard tutorial for a 5-minute guide.

Notify the Hub

Send a single POST request:

# Notify the AQA Hub curl -X POST https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/notify \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"url": "https://your-site.com/faq"}'

Response (201):
{"status":"accepted","conformance_level":"standard","questions_count":12}

Automate notifications

Add a hook in your CMS, CI/CD, or cron job:

# Python import requests requests.post('https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/notify', json={'url': 'https://your-site.com/faq'}) # Cron (daily at 6am) 0 6 * * * curl -s -X POST https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/notify \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"url": "https://your-site.com/faq"}'

The 3 AQA conformance levels

The Hub grades every notification on a three-tier conformance scale. Higher tiers unlock richer features in downstream AI answers such as source attribution, voice rendering and verified-answer badges.

Basic

Minimal markup: a valid FAQPage JSON-LD block with Question and acceptedAnswer nodes. Nothing else. This is the floor to be indexed by the Hub at all. Expect your entries to show up in AI answers as unlabelled quotes with generic attribution to your domain.

Standard

Basic plus the AQA metadata extension: aqa:country, aqa:sector, aqa:language and a publication or modification timestamp. Standard enables audience filtering in the public stream, which means Perplexity can restrict its retrieval to Q and A items relevant to the user’s market. This is the recommended baseline for any production site.

Premium

Standard plus speakable for voice assistants, author and dateModified for authority signals, and aqa:verifiedAnswer for answers explicitly confirmed by a human editor. Premium is what makes your content eligible for the verified-answer badge displayed by Perplexity and the voice-rendering treatment used by Siri-style interfaces.

Query the Hub (for AI systems)

AI crawlers and third-party aggregators can consume the Hub through three read-only endpoints. All responses are paginated JSON, no authentication required.

# Recent updates, newest first GET https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/updates # Filter by country, sector, language GET https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/updates?country=US§or=ecommerce&language=en # Single URL status GET https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/status?url=https://your-site.com/faq # Public stats: volume per country, sector and level GET https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/stats

Typical retrieval latency from notification to visibility in /updates is under two minutes. Crawlers poll the endpoint on their own cadence; the Hub does not push to them.

One page = one notification

The Hub validates one URL at a time. If your site has multiple FAQ pages with AQA markup, you need to notify each URL separately.

Notify multiple pages at once

# Bash — notify all FAQ pages from your sitemap curl -s https://your-site.com/sitemap.xml \ | grep -oP '<loc>\K[^<]+' \ | grep -i faq \ | while read url; do curl -s -X POST https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/notify \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d "{\"url\": \"$url\"}" sleep 1 done # Python — notify a list of pages import requests pages = [ 'https://your-site.com/faq', 'https://your-site.com/faq/pricing', 'https://your-site.com/faq/technical', ] for url in pages: r = requests.post('https://ailabsaudit.com/api/aqa/notify', json={'url': url}) print(f'{url}: {r.json()}')

Common errors and how to fix them

Every rejected notification returns a predictable HTTP status code. Here are the five you are most likely to meet in production.

400 Invalid URL

The URL payload is missing a scheme, contains spaces or is not a proper absolute URL. Always pass https://, percent-encode non-ASCII characters, and strip tracking fragments before submitting.

422 No AQA markup detected

The Hub reached the page but could not find a valid FAQPage JSON-LD block. Add a <script type="application/ld+json"> block to your FAQ page with at least one Question and one acceptedAnswer, then re-notify. Use the validator to confirm.

429 Rate limit

You exceeded 50 notifications per hour for a given domain, or you submitted the same URL more than once in 24 hours. Stagger your batch jobs with a small sleep between calls and schedule daily full-site refreshes off-peak.

404 Page not reachable

The Hub received an HTTP error when fetching the URL. Check that the page is public, that robots.txt does not disallow the Hub user agent, and that no geo-fence or Cloudflare challenge blocks the request.

500 Server error

A transient Hub failure. Retry with exponential backoff: 5s, 15s, 45s, then give up after three attempts and log the incident. If the error persists for more than ten minutes on a specific URL, open an issue on the spec repository.

Real-world use cases

The right automation pattern depends on how often your FAQ content changes and where those changes originate.

E-commerce with 500 product FAQs

Run a nightly job that reads the product sitemap, loops over every FAQ URL, and notifies the Hub with a 1-second sleep between calls to respect the rate limit. Trigger an additional notification on the fly whenever a merchandiser saves a change in the back office.

SaaS with a weekly changelog

Hook the Hub notification into your CI/CD pipeline. On every production deploy that touches /pricing, /changelog or /docs, fire a POST so the new pricing tier or feature reaches AI assistants before the marketing announcement goes out.

Media site publishing 50 articles a day

An hourly cron that diffs the last hour of published editorial FAQs against the Hub state and notifies the deltas. This keeps Perplexity and ChatGPT in sync with your fact-checks and story corrections without hammering the rate limit.

Public service with legal information

A daily cron at 05:00 that re-notifies every canonical FAQ page. Legal content changes rarely but when it does, the daily cadence guarantees the AI layer is no more than 24 hours behind, with a manual override available for urgent updates.

AQA Hub vs traditional indexing

Dimension	Traditional indexing	AQA Hub
Latency	24 to 48 hours	Under 2 minutes
Scope	Every page on your site	FAQ pages only, targeted
Signal quality	Generic HTML, full-page	Structured Q and A with metadata
Cost	Free	Free
Audience	Search engines (Google, Bing)	AI models (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude)

The two systems are complementary. Keep your sitemap for search. Use the AQA Hub for AI.

Validate without code

Don’t want to use the command line? Use the AQA Validator — paste your URL, click "Validate & Notify Hub", and the validation + notification happens in one click.

The validator shows your conformance level, detected questions, errors, and recommendations to reach the next level.

Rate limits: 50 notifications/hour per domain. Same URL once every 24 hours.

AQA Hub FAQ

Is the Hub really free?

Yes. AQA is an open protocol and the reference Hub operated at ailabsaudit.com is free to use with no commercial plan attached. Operating costs are covered by the parent project.

How long until an AI sees my update?

On the Hub side, a notification appears in the public stream within two minutes. After that the latency depends on each AI system: Perplexity polls roughly every 15 minutes, ChatGPT on the order of two hours, and other crawlers vary. Expect most assistants to surface your update within the same business day.

Do I have to register?

No. The Hub is intentionally anonymous at the publisher level. You do not create an account, you do not generate an API key, you simply POST the URL you want indexed.

Does the Hub share my data?

Everything you submit is public by design. The Hub is a broadcast layer, not a private channel. Do not notify URLs that contain confidential information.

How do I verify it worked?

Use GET /api/aqa/status?url=https://your-site.com/faq. The response returns the last notification timestamp, the detected conformance level, the number of questions, and any validation warnings.

What if my site has several languages?

Notify each language URL separately, and set the language metadata field on each page. The Hub treats /en/faq and /es/faq as independent entries with their own conformance level.

Can I run my own Hub?

Yes. The specification and reference implementation are open source on github.com/ailabsaudit/aqa-spec. Private deployments are useful for enterprise networks that need a Hub inside their own perimeter.

Resources

AQA Hub — live dashboard and public update stream
AQA Validator — validate and notify in one click
AQA Standard Tutorial — implement the markup in 5 minutes
aqa-spec.org — protocol specification
GitHub: ailabsaudit/aqa-spec — reference implementation and issue tracker
Postman collection, OpenAPI schema and video walkthroughs available from the spec site

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