ARTF stands for Agentic RTB Framework and refers to IAB Tech Lab’s tech specification, designed to streamline the implementation of agentic buying marketplaces.
What Is ARTF?
From a technical perspective, ARTF implies each agentic service is deployed into a host system infrastructure via a container, enabling it to streamline specific processes and tasks, according to a particular value proposition offered by the agent.
The scope of tasks is rather wide and may include pre-bid fraud detection, inventory enrichment, deal activation, bid floor adjustment, just to name a few.
How It Works
The logic within containerized agents is communicating with the host infrastructure via MCP or gRPC. Upon receiving a call from the host system along with the relevant data from the bid request, the container will return a so-called oRTB Patch, which includes a series of suggested changes, called mutations, alongside a declared intent for each. Subsequently, the mutation(s) will either be approved, or declined on a host side.
Benefits of ARTF
Quite predictably, implementing ARTF can help resolve a series of challenges associated with programmatic advertising, i.e. reduce latency, decrease server response times, improve the efficiency of fraud detection on a pre-bid level, increase the effectiveness of post-bid optimization, and more.
More importantly, at a broader scale, industry-wide adoption of ARTF as a standard could pave the way for a wider scope of use cases, hence enabling the faster acceleration of systemic autonomous agent integration across the entire programmatic ad ecosystem.
Perspectives of Adoption
The initial ARTF specification was available for public comment until January 31, 2026, and as of late February, 2026, the final standard is still under development.
In this respect, even though the programmatic advertising industry is clearly supportive of a common standard for the smoother implementation of agentic media buying services, as already seen from the positive market reaction to the release of another agentic AI initiative – AdCP, earlier in 2025.
However, the actual adoption process is likely to be lengthy.
First, the proposed ARTF specification clearly implies significant involvement from technical specialists and product teams, requiring substantial operational and financial resources from agentic service vendors.
Second, as of Q1 2026, only a few large ad platforms are already working or engaged with ARTF, which is clearly insufficient for its industry-wide use. In view of this, the gradual adoption of the standard is likely to accelerate in 2027, according to optimistic forecasts.