Certification
For service providers. Certification is how a service earns
placement in Nitrograph: certified services form the top curation tier
in ranking, are the only routing pool for intent-based
managed invocation, and carry a public badge with
badge_since provenance.
What certification involves
- A benchmarked query set. Your service is run against a twenty-query benchmark for its category, scored by the same versioned validation ruleset that governs refunds in production — the certification bar and the refund bar are the same bar.
- Human review. A person looks at the results before the badge materializes.
- A negotiated relationship. Certified suppliers can carry a negotiated platform take rate, reflected automatically in every quote.
Apply with POST /v1/certification/apply (scope-authed, idempotent),
or through the merchant page at
nitrograph.com/merchants.
What certification is not
Certification is not a ranking payment. It gates eligibility — for the top curation tier and for intent routing — but position within the rankings comes from outcomes:
- Discover ranking (
GET /v1/discover?q=<task>- the only rank surface): certification is a curation boost among task fit, settled validated outcomes, probe and paid-call health, refund rates, and structural quality. Every settled, validated call your service completes improves its rank for that task. Price is displayed, never ranked - position cannot be bought.
Staying certified
Outcomes keep counting after the badge:
- Every settled or refunded managed invocation updates your success rate, refund rate, and trust signals.
- A sustained refund spike auto-pauses a supplier out of routing pending manual review — certified or not. Paused suppliers take no new paid calls.
- Certification can be revoked.
Your public card
Every service has a public, unmetered card at
GET /v1/service/:slug/public (rendered at /s/[slug]): description,
call card, price, certification status and badge_since, 30-day probe
history, and traffic-derived stats. Fields with no data yet are null
— absence of evidence, shown as absence, not as zero.
The pitch, honestly
Nitrograph's index has 11,000+ ranked services; most are long-tail x402 endpoints nobody has vetted. Certification is the mechanism that separates "listed" from "provable": benchmarked against the production validation bar, outcome-tracked in public, and routable by intent. If your service is good, discover is where that becomes legible — and rank cannot be bought, only earned, one settled validated call at a time.