brand.context: A Machine-Readable Evidence Standard for Closing the Linkage Gap in Agentic Commerce

Version 2.0 revises and supersedes Version 1.0 (April 2026) in full. It introduces the Linkage Gap and adds formal RFC 2119 conformance language, an evidence-confidence model distinguishing verified from self-declared claims, an explicit gap_type field marking which evidence categories are addressable through this schema versus which reflect structural model judgments that evidence alone will not override, a new section positioning brand.context against other current machine-readable standards (OKF, ARD, LLMs.txt, EntityMap), and a single canonical domain and citation chain. Version 1.0 remains archived at its original DOI for historical reference only and should not be used as the current specification.