Agent readiness
Agent readiness is how well your website works when the visitor is an AI agent, so it can find your facts and complete a task.
Agent readiness is how well your website works when the visitor is software. An AI agent doing a job for someone needs to reach your pages, read the facts on them, and sometimes click through a form or a checkout. A site that's ready lets it do all of that.
This matters because a person may never see your site at all. If the agent can't find your price, it picks a competitor whose price it can find.
What makes a site ready
Most of this is work you'd do for people anyway:
- Text that's in the page's HTML from the start
- Prices, plans, delivery areas and other facts written out in words
- Buttons and form fields with clear labels
- Nothing important hidden behind tabs, pop-ups or a login
- Rules in your robots.txt that let the right AI bots in
If you've made your site work with a screen reader, you've done a lot of this already. Agents and screen readers both rely on clean, labelled pages.
An example
Kestrel Roasters shows its subscription prices in a slider that loads after the page opens. A person sees £12 a month. An agent asked to find the cheapest coffee subscription reads the HTML, finds no price, and leaves Kestrel out of the comparison.
Writing the price into the page fixes it for agents and for search engines at the same time.
In AnswerOrbit
The Pages tab in Website shows each page side by side as What a person sees and What a bot reads. Blocks bots miss are marked Hidden from bots, with why and how to fix it. The Audit tab shows which AI bots your robots.txt lets in. Page checks test one page against eight checks, including whether it shows without scripts.