Intesta: An Attested Fact Registry for AI Agents and Small Businesses

Overview

Intesta is a public fact registry designed specifically for small businesses. It enables AI agents to query verified business data through the Model Context Protocol instead of scraping outdated web pages or making up answers. Developed by Darius Ceponas, the platform solves the critical issue of agent hallucination regarding real-world business facts, such as delivery terms, opening hours, and return policies.

Benefits

Intesta offers several key advantages for both small business owners and AI users. The most important benefit is the elimination of incorrect information. Currently, when an AI agent asks about a local business, it often scrapes random pages or invents answers. This leads to wrong delivery estimates, incorrect opening hours, and fake return policies. Intesta prevents this by using a refuse instead of guessing principle. The system ensures that answers come strictly from a verified fact passport associated with the business.

The platform uses a trust ladder ranging from A0 to A4, where A1 represents verified domain control. Each fact is attested and appended to a ledger-backed passport page, ensuring a visible history of changes. The answer engine is designed to prevent hallucinations through strict grounding. A grounding verifier enforces that at least 75% of tokens in any generated sentence must trace to cited facts. Every number, URL, and email must exist in the source facts. Sentences that fail this check are dropped and replaced with verbatim passport data.

If no matching fact exists in the business passport, the agent receives an explicit refusal rather than a guess. The unanswered question is logged for the business owner as uncovered, providing a feedback mechanism to identify missing information. This transparency helps business owners know exactly what data they need to provide to serve their customers better.

Use Cases

Intesta is ideal for small businesses like shops, restaurants, and service providers whose facts are often absent from structured databases entirely. Business owners can register an entity, prove domain control via a DNS TXT record or a file under /.well-known/intesta, and publish structured facts. These facts include delivery terms, return policies, fees, contacts, and opening hours.

AI agents can use Intesta to get accurate information about local businesses. Users can install the MCP server without a local installation by using a remote transport. For Claude Code, users can run a specific command to add the connector. For ChatGPT, users can navigate to Settings, go to Connectors, select Advanced, turn on Developer mode, and add the connector URL. For Claude.ai, users can navigate to Settings, go to Connectors, and add a custom connector.

Humans can also benefit from Intesta through an on-site Verified facts widget. This widget can be embedded via a single script tag on a website. It displays answers strictly from verified facts, ensuring that customers see accurate information directly on the business site.

Pricing

Intesta offers a flexible pricing model to suit different needs. Registration is free for all users. Single lookups, including entity pages, passports, and ask or search calls, are also free. Paid plans are available for scaling needs. These plans include bulk search capabilities, API keys with higher allowances, change monitoring for agents, and richer payment-verified passports for owners.

Vibes

Intesta represents a shift in the MCP ecosystem from raw connectivity toward structured trust. The developer has posed several open design questions for the community to ensure the platform evolves with user needs. These questions include whether refuse when the fact is missing is the right default or if a best effort mode should exist. The platform aims to make agents reliable enough for commercial transactions with small businesses. By focusing on verification first, Intesta addresses a significant gap in the current AI landscape where small business data is often unreliable or missing.

Additional Information

Intesta is part of a fast-emerging category of verification-first MCP services. It differs from competitors like ENTIA and Veritap, which focus on enterprise-grade entity verification against regulatory registries. Intesta specifically targets small businesses whose facts are often absent from structured databases entirely. Other projects in the verification-first landscape include modelcontextprotocol.registry, github.veritap-dev, github.foundrynet, github.beepboop2025, and entia.mcp-verified-company-data. The platform is built on a robust infrastructure with a backend using FastAPI and Postgres. Security and operations are handled with Nginx in front and systemd timers for backups. Privacy is maintained by computing traffic stats from access logs as counters only, with no IP addresses or user agents stored. The system includes 190 pytest cases, including an adversarial set of questions designed to prevent the engine from inventing facts.