Kerq.dev Whitepaper — Trust Scoring for AI Tools

Kerq: Trust Scoring for Autonomous AI Agents

Executive Summary

AI agents are becoming the operating system of autonomous systems. They orchestrate thousands of external tools — APIs, services, and integrations — to execute tasks across every domain: finance, operations, content, DevOps, and beyond.

The problem is stark: There is no standardized way to evaluate the reliability of these tools before connecting an agent to them.

Developers today face three options, all broken:

• Trust the vendor's marketing — which has zero correlation to actual performance
• Try it and find out — after it breaks production
• Build custom monitoring — weeks of engineering, proprietary to your use case

Kerq solves this with a 7-metric trust scoring engine that automatically evaluates every tool in real-time.

Tool providers get free listings and transparent feedback. Developers get a single API call that returns a trust score and performance data before connecting their agents. A "Certified" badge shows providers who have sustained reliability for 30 days.

Kerq is trust infrastructure for autonomous agent commerce — designed to be baked into agent workflows everywhere.

The Problem: No Trust Layer for AI Tools

Autonomous agents are different from traditional software in one critical way: they make decisions based on outputs from external tools.

If an agent calls a service API, data provider, or integration and gets a corrupt response, the agent doesn't just fail — it acts on bad data. This compounds across distributed workflows, especially in autonomous systems that span multiple organizations and services.

Traditional reliability frameworks don't apply here:

• SLAs are broken constantly and mean nothing without enforcement mechanisms
• Uptime claims are self-reported with no third-party verification
• Error patterns are invisible — you only find out when integration breaks
• Dependency chains are opaque — a tool's reliability depends on its own dependencies, but no one maps these
• Recovery speed is unknown — what happens when the service goes down? How long until it recovers?

Enterprises solving this problem today build custom monitoring stacks. The result: siloed data, no benchmarking, no ecosystem-wide insights.

This fragmentation is a blocker for agent adoption at scale.

Agents need a trust signal they can query before orchestrating work. Providers need visibility into what's dragging their score down. The ecosystem needs standardization.

The Kerq Solution: Automated Trust Scoring

Kerq continuously probes every tool in its Score Index and assigns a trust score based on real performance data.

Here's how it works:

Listing (Free)
Tool providers submit their integration or claim an existing listing. No cost. No approval process. Kerq immediately begins probing.

Continuous Health Monitoring
Kerq runs automated health checks against each tool 24/7:

• API endpoints — latency, errors, availability
• Response payloads — data consistency and correctness
• Dependency chains — does the tool itself depend on services that are degraded?

Real-Time Scoring
Based on continuous monitoring, each tool gets a trust score that updates in real-time. Developers see the current state, not historical averages.

Certification (Optional)
Providers can certify their tools through a 30-day automated audit. The audit runs for 12 months and runs the same probes as regular scoring, but it validates sustained 30-day performance. Certified tools show a badge showing they've passed this audit.

The 7 Trust Metrics

Each tool is scored on seven dimensions:

1. Uptime
What percentage of time is the tool available and responding? Kerq measures availability across all protocols and deployment models the tool supports.

2. Response Time
How long does the tool take to respond to requests? Slow tools create cascading delays in agent workflows. Kerq tracks median, p95, and p99 latencies to capture the full response profile.

3. Error Rate
What percentage of requests fail or return errors? This includes HTTP errors, timeouts, and malformed responses.

4. Consistency
Does the tool return the same data for the same request, or are responses flaky? Consistency is critical for agents making decisions; inconsistent data breaks agent logic.

5. Throughput
Can the tool handle concurrent requests? Kerq measures max sustainable request rate before degradation, ensuring the tool can handle agent scale.

6. Recovery
When a tool goes down, how long until it recovers? Recovery time affects downstream agent workflows. A tool that fails for 10 seconds but recovers instantly is different from one that fails for 30 minutes.

7. Dependency Health
The tool itself depends on other services. Kerq monitors these dependency chains. If a tool depends on a degraded database or external service, that's a signal.

These seven metrics give developers a complete picture of tool reliability before integration. Just measured performance — the insights speak for themselves.

How Developers Use Kerq

Kerq's API is designed to be called before an agent makes a decision to use a tool. A single API call returns a trust score, certification status, and all seven performance metrics — giving agents the data they need to make routing and fallback decisions in real time.

See kerq.dev/developer for current API reference.

Pricing

• Free tier: 10,000 API calls per month — enough for most teams to benchmark and test
• High Volume Access tier: $499/month for high-volume calls, designed for production-scale autonomous agent fleets

How Tool Providers Benefit

Tool providers see transparent, actionable feedback on what's affecting their score.

Free Listing
No cost to list. No payment required. Kerq begins scoring immediately.

Performance Dashboard
Providers log in and see:

• Current trust score (updated hourly)
• Breakdown by metric (uptime, latency, errors, consistency, etc.)
• Performance trends (last 7 days, 30 days)
• Actionable alerts — "Your error rate spiked 2 hours ago. Here are the requests that failed"

Certification
After 30 days of sustained high performance, providers can earn a "Certified" badge.

This badge appears:

• On the Kerq Score Index (next to their tool)
• Upon Certification - Tool Providers receive an embeddable "Kerq Certified" Badge to place anywhere.

Certification shows discipline, not payment. It's earned through performance, not purchased.

No Pay-to-Play
Tool providers are never forced to pay for rankings, featured placements, or score boosts. The Score Index is meritocratic — trust scores are earned, not bought.

Why This Matters for Autonomous Agents

Autonomous agents are only as reliable as their weakest dependency.

Today, developers have no way to know which dependencies are weak until they fail. By then, the agent has already made decisions based on bad data.

Kerq changes this:

• Before integration: Agents query trust scores and make informed routing decisions
• During operation: Agents fall back to alternate tools if primary tools degrade
• Across workflows: Trust becomes a first-class metric in agent decision trees

This enables autonomous agent commerce — systems that can make high-confidence decisions by trusting verified tools.

Certification for Tool Providers: How It Works

The 30-day certification audit is straightforward:

1. Provider claims their tool in the Kerq dashboard
2. Applies for certification — one click
3. Kerq runs the same health checks for 30 days (same probes, same metrics)
4. If performance stays above threshold: Certified badge is awarded
5. Certification eligibility can be renewed annually — requires sustained performance

This is not pay-to-win. It's an automated performance audit that any tool can pass. Providers are incentivized to keep their tool reliable to keep their badge.

Certification is a one-time $499 audit fee for tool providers. Providers can certify multiple tools independently.

API & Pricing Tiers

Free Tier

• Up to 10,000 API calls per month
• Access to full Score Index and trust scores
• No authentication required for Score Index browsing
• Ideal for: Teams evaluating tools, development/staging environments

High Volume Access Tier

• High-volume API access
• 100 req/s · no monthly cap · fair use policy
• $499/month
• Production-grade rate limiting and reliability
• Ideal for: Autonomous agent fleets, agent SDKs, large-scale integrations

What Kerq Doesn't Do

Kerq is not a security scanner. It doesn't evaluate code quality, vulnerability scanning, or compliance certifications.

Security is separate from trust. A tool can be secure but unreliable. Kerq measures reliability.

Security should be evaluated through:

• Code audits and vulnerability scanning
• Security certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc.)
• Dependency scanning and supply chain reviews

Kerq complements these but doesn't replace them.

Getting Started with Kerq

For Developers:

Step 1: Get an API Key — Sign up at kerq.dev/signup — choose Free or High-Volume Access tier.

Step 2: Explore the API — See kerq.dev/developer for current API reference, endpoints, and integration guides.

Step 3: Integrate into Your Agent — Use trust scores to make routing and fallback decisions in your agent workflows.

Explore the Score Index: Visit kerq.dev — browse tools, search by category, filter by trust score and certification status. No login required.

For Tool Providers:

Step 1: Claim Your Tool — Search for your tool on kerq.dev. If it exists, claim it. If not, submit it for listing.

Step 2: View Your Dashboard — See your trust score, metric breakdown, and performance trends.

Step 3: Improve — Use the actionable feedback to fix issues, improve performance, and earn a certification badge.

Step 4: Certify (Optional) — Apply for certification eligibility. After 30 days of strong performance, earn an embeddable badge that developers trust.

Conclusion

Autonomous agents are moving fast. The tools they rely on need to be verified, measured, and trusted.

Kerq is the infrastructure layer that makes this possible — transparent, automatic, and free for everyone.

Tools get listed, scored, and improved. Developers get trust data before integration. The ecosystem gets standardization.

Kerq = Trust as infrastructure.

View full project at https://kerq.dev/