Per-answer route facts
Route receipts describe the runtime path that served a specific AI response, not just the model family or product tier shown in the UI.
Specification v0.1
Route Receipt Specification
A portable receipt format for showing which model route, tool path, fallback state, safety intervention, and processing scope shaped an AI answer.
Public v0.1 reference specification for implementation, citation, and review.
route_receipt.json
v0.1
- model
- provider/resolved_id
- tools
- retrieval, search
- fallback
- attempted=false
- view
- user | auditor
Portable JSON Schema
The v0.1 schema defines required fields, disclosure states, redaction markers, and extension points for provider-specific metadata.
Practical disclosure boundary
The format exposes consequential route facts without exposing private reasoning, safety-bypass details, or proprietary router logic.
Route Receipt Specification
Route Receipt is a reference format for the runtime path behind an AI answer. It gives developers, users, and auditors a compact record of the provider, served model, tool path, fallback state, safety intervention, and processing scope that shaped one response.
When a system can silently choose among models, aliases, tools, tiers, regions, and fallback paths, the answer alone does not capture the full record. A route receipt gives the user-facing or audit-facing facts needed to understand how that answer was produced without exposing private reasoning traces or proprietary router internals.
For a non-technical reader, it is similar to a delivery receipt: it leaves out every internal warehouse decision but still shows enough of the route to answer practical questions about which service handled the request, which model actually responded, whether search or retrieval ran, whether a fallback happened, and which parts of the route were deliberately withheld.
Artifacts included
The v0.1 release includes a human-readable specification, a JSON Schema that validates receipt documents, and implementation notes for product teams adding route receipts to APIs, logs, dashboards, and audit exports.
The canonical schema is at /schemas/route-receipt/v0.1/schema.json, using the same versioned URL pattern and semantic versioning.
Start here
Start with What is this? for the overview, then use the specification for exact fields and validation rules. The implementation notes explain how to add receipts to an API, dashboard, log pipeline, or audit export.
Current project status
Route Receipt v0.1 is maintained by Vincent Schmalbach as a public reference specification outside schema.org and W3C. It is small enough for real providers, application teams, and research prototypes to adopt without waiting for a committee process.