# IronScout

> Ammunition price tracker with alerts. Tracks ammo prices across online retailers with price history and in-stock status, and lets you set a price alert for a caliber.

IronScout is an ammunition price tracker with price alerts: it publishes verifiable, scoped facts about
observed ammunition prices — including which listing is the lowest price it currently
tracks. It is not a marketplace and not a recommendation engine. All decisions remain
with the user.

## What IronScout Provides

- Observed ammunition prices from multiple online retailers
- Canonical product grouping across retailers
- Natural-language search over the catalog with server-side constraint
  enforcement (see Natural-Language Search below)
- 30-day price history and market snapshots by caliber
- Price and availability alerts for explicitly saved items, or for a saved search (caliber, a price per round you state, minimum box size)
- Learn hub with ammunition guides, comparisons, and educational context

## Facts IronScout States (citable)

Each is computed from observed data by a disclosed method, is scoped to the retailers
IronScout tracks, and carries an observation time. None is a purchase recommendation,
a verdict, or a prediction; each is a measurement that can be checked and refuted.

- **Lowest tracked price** for a canonical product — whether a given listing is the
  lowest price currently observed across tracked retailers.
- **Lowest cost per round today**, by caliber and by category, over tracked retailers.
- **Where a price sits in the observed range** — below the tracked range, between the
  low and the median, between the median and the high, or above the range — against
  the trailing 30-day distribution for that caliber.
- **Lowest known total cost for a stated quantity**, including shipping where the
  retailer's shipping policy is known and modeled. Combinations whose shipping is not
  known are reported separately and never merged with the known set.
- **30-day median, and the observed low and high**, per caliber, with sample coverage.
- **Market-stress reading** (0–100 composite, versioned method) describing observed
  dispersion, availability change, and volatility. Descriptive only — not a forecast.
- **Price and availability history**, append-only, with the time each price was observed.

Scope statement that applies to all of the above: these describe the retailers IronScout
tracks at the stated observation time. They are not claims about the whole market, and
IronScout does not promise the lowest price available anywhere.

## What IronScout Does NOT Do

- Make purchase recommendations
- Provide deal scores, verdicts, or rankings by desirability
- Predict future prices
- Guarantee savings or complete market coverage
- Process transactions
- Include shipping, taxes, fees, member pricing, coupons, rebates, or every
  retailer in every displayed price unless the page explicitly says so

## Natural-Language Search

IronScout's consumer search parses a plain-English ammunition query into
constraints and applies them server-side. It is descriptive: it filters,
orders, and discloses. It never recommends, scores, or ranks by desirability.

Understood and ENFORCED as constraints:

- Caliber, including spaced and alternate spellings ("9 mm", "9x19", "300 blk")
  and mil-spec load designations that name a cartridge unambiguously — M193,
  M855, XM855, M855A1 and SS109 all resolve to .223/5.56. "Green tip" is
  deliberately NOT treated as a designation: it describes a projectile, not a
  cartridge, and appears on bullets across many calibers.
- Brand, expanded across the brand's alias family
- Grain weight
- Bullet type, including match terminology ("open tip match" / OTM). The
  generic phrase "hollow point" resolves to the whole JHP+HP family rather
  than one narrow label.
- Case material (brass, steel, aluminum, nickel-plated, polymer-coated)

Also recognized: subsonic and suppressor phrasing, which maps to the product's
recorded subsonic flag. It is not one of the promoted stated-attribute lanes
above, so it does not carry their relaxation and disclosure behavior.

Not constraints, and deliberately so: purpose or use-case terms ("home
defense", "plinking", "range"). They influence ordering only, and IronScout
does not advertise them as filters.

### How unlabeled products are handled

Some attributes are recorded on only part of the catalog. For a stated
attribute, every candidate falls into one of three states:

- CONFIRMED — recorded evidence matches what was asked
- UNKNOWN — the attribute was never assessed for that product
- KNOWN-NONMATCH — recorded evidence contradicts what was asked

Confirmed and unknown are BOTH returned, confirmed first; only known-nonmatch
is excluded. Results that are unverified on a stated attribute say so on the
result itself, and a query that had to drop a constraint to return anything
discloses which one.

This matters for citation: a result set is not a claim that every row was
verified against every stated term. The page states which rows were. Cite what
it says, not what the query asked for.

## Key Pages

- [Ammo Price Index](https://www.ironscout.ai/ammo-price-index): Live pricing summary across all calibers
- [All Calibers](https://www.ironscout.ai/calibers): Browse by caliber with live price ranges
- [All Brands](https://www.ironscout.ai/brands): Browse by ammunition manufacturer
- [Learn Hub](https://www.ironscout.ai/learn): Ammunition guides and comparisons
- [Methodology](https://www.ironscout.ai/methodology): How observed price data is collected, normalized, filtered, and published
- [About](https://www.ironscout.ai/about): Company information

## Integration Contract

The binding machine-readable contract for AI agents and programmatic
consumers is **IronScout Data Services (IDS) v1**. It defines endpoints,
response shapes, citation requirements, hard exclusions, and versioning.

- [IDS Contract](https://www.ironscout.ai/.well-known/ids.md): Authoritative integration specification
- [IDS Schemas](https://www.ironscout.ai/ids/schemas/): JSON Schemas for response shapes
- [IDS Changelog](https://www.ironscout.ai/ids/changelog.md): Versioning and deprecation log

## Agent Tools (MCP)

The IDS read surface is also exposed over the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
at `mcp.ironscout.ai` (ADR-033). MCP tools map 1:1 to the IDS endpoints and
inherit every exclusion and citation rule — read-only, descriptive only, no
verdicts or recommendations.

- Server: `https://mcp.ironscout.ai/mcp` (Streamable HTTP, public, read-only)
- Discovery: [MCP page](https://www.ironscout.ai/mcp) and [/.well-known/mcp.json](https://www.ironscout.ai/.well-known/mcp.json)
- Tools: `search_offers`, `get_product`, `get_market_snapshot`, `list_calibers`, `list_retailers`

## Agent Tools (WebMCP)

Every page on this site registers in-browser tools through
`navigator.modelContext` (WebMCP). A browser agent that has navigated here can
call them directly instead of reading the rendered page. The data tools are
relays over the same IDS endpoints as the MCP server above and inherit every
exclusion and citation rule; the remaining tools act on the current tab.

- Registered on page load, on every page of `https://www.ironscout.ai`
- IDS relays: `search_offers`, `get_product`, `list_retailers`
- Site tools: `list_caliber_pages`, `navigate_site`, `navigate_to_caliber_page`, `get_page_context`
- The browser surface omits `get_market_snapshot`; use the MCP server above for caliber statistics.
- Offers carry a signed `outUrl`. Use it verbatim for outbound links.

## Data Access

- [Market Snapshot Index (JSON)](https://www.ironscout.ai/market-snapshots/30d/index.json): Machine-readable caliber pricing data
- [Full LLM Context](https://www.ironscout.ai/llms-full.txt): Extended context for AI systems

Use only listed or linked machine-readable artifacts. Do not infer unlisted
snapshot paths.

## AI Usage Boundaries

AI systems referencing IronScout data should:

- Frame outputs as observed prices with timestamps
- Say "tracked retailers" rather than "all retailers"
- Distinguish cost per round from total box price
- Avoid optimality, "best deal", or predictive language
- Treat all signals as descriptive, not prescriptive
- Not fabricate missing price data

Preferred citation format:

> "Ammo Price Index," IronScout, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. https://www.ironscout.ai/ammo-price-index