TL;DR
Besides people, there's a new user on your website: the AI agent that performs tasks on behalf of customers. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity now all provide guidelines for making your site agent-ready. You won't see this traffic in your analytics, so you only notice something's wrong when competitors get recommended instead. With five free tools, you can check today how far along you are.
Booking an appointment, requesting a quote, comparing a product and ordering it. The consequence for marketing is concrete: being visible or getting cited in AI answers is no longer enough (it never really was); your site also has to be usable by agents. If an agent gets stuck on your site and checks out smoothly at a competitor, it will pick the competitor next time. The customer only sees the result. Getting in early gives you a lead that's hard to close later. That brings you to the question this blog is about: can an agent already use your site, and how can you improve that?
Agents are already being used on a massive scale
This is no longer a thing of the future. According to a report by HUMAN Security, AI agent traffic grew 7,851% year-over-year in 2025, and 2.3% of all AI agent activity now takes place on checkout pages. So agents don't just read, they also check out. Google recently published an official guide on web.dev ("Build agent-friendly websites") that explicitly calls on developers to build sites with the AI agent as a first-class visitor in mind. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have each published their own documentation for site owners in the meantime. That makes Agent Optimization no longer an experiment by a handful of early adopters, but a design mandate on the same level as responsive design ten years ago.
What is Agent Optimization?
Agent Optimization is the discipline of building a website so that an AI agent can reliably work with it. Not by building a separate version of your site, but by structuring the existing site so that it's just as readable and usable for an agent as it is for a human.
Agent Optimization Definition
The comparison Google itself makes is a good one: what helps for accessibility (screen readers, people with disabilities) also helps for agents. Both need to understand a page without relying on visual context. Semantic HTML instead of loose divs, labels linked to form fields, stable layouts instead of shifting elements, a clear heading structure. These are things marketers already know from accessibility checks; they just get a second business reason for them now.
What the big AI players say about it themselves
What's striking is that the advice from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity overlaps remarkably. Not because they've coordinated, but because they all run into the same problem: how do you read a site that was built for human eyes?
Agent Optimization Guidelines
Google published an official guide on web.dev, placing agent-friendliness alongside performance and accessibility as a design guideline. For ChatGPT Atlas, their browser agent, OpenAI explains that agents read pages through ARIA tags: the same labels and roles that screen readers use. Anthropic does something similar for Claude for Chrome and reads pages primarily through the underlying page structure. Perplexity mainly advises a clear content structure and not hiding content behind JavaScript.
The common thread is clear: agents don't read your site the way a human does, through image and color, but through the underlying structure, the same layer that screen readers for blind users run on. Anyone who makes their site accessible to screen readers today automatically does a large part of the work for AI agents too.
Why you don't see it in your analytics
An important point to keep in the back of your mind: AI agent traffic is largely invisible in the dashboards marketing steers by today. An agent does sometimes click and scroll, but mechanically and in seconds, not like a human who looks around and hesitates. No scroll depth, no time-on-page, no tutorial completions, no conversions in the classic sense. Yet it was definitely there; it read your content and, based on that, either made a recommendation or it didn't.
5 free Agent Optimization tools to improve your website
Naturally, you now want to know right away how agent-ready your site already is and what else you can improve. Good news: there are a few really good free tools that let you get started with Agent Optimization straight away.
A warning up front to avoid confusion: there are two scanners with almost identical names, isagentready.com (without "it") and isitagentready.com (with "it"). They're two different tools from two different makers, and they measure different things. Worth knowing both.
Glippy is a Chrome extension by Dutch SEO professional Jan Willem Bobbink that analyzes whether your page is ready for LLM crawlers, AI agents and AI interfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. The tool runs more than 240 checks locally in your browser, spread across 16 categories, including semantic structure, machine readability, structured data and WebMCP compatibility. You get a score from 0 to 100 with a letter grade and concrete improvement points per category. Because the scan runs locally, no data is sent to a server. There's a free and a paid version; a desktop app is on the roadmap.
Glippy GEO Check
isagentready.com is a Dutch-language agent scanner by Bart Waardenburg that assesses your site across five categories: AI content discovery (robots.txt for the major AI bots, sitemaps, llms.txt), AI search signals (JSON-LD, schema.org, entity linking), content & semantics (accessibility tree, heading hierarchy, SSR detection), agent protocols (WebMCP, A2A Agent Cards, MCP discovery, OpenAPI) and security & trust (HTTPS, HSTS, CSP). You get a score per category with a letter grade and concrete recommendations, and you can compare yourself with other sites via the leaderboard. For marketing, this is probably the most usable of the bunch: the categories map well onto the way you think about your website.
Isagentready Thinkagainnl
isitagentready.com is by Cloudflare and looks at the same question from a different angle: more infrastructure, less content. The tool scores your site on four dimensions (discoverability, content accessibility, bot access control, capabilities) and checks things like robots.txt, markdown content negotiation, MCP endpoints and OAuth. For every failed check you get a prompt you can paste straight into a coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor) to have the fix carried out. A good complement to isagentready.com if you want to dive deeper into the technical side.
Siteline Agent Readiness Check is a free scan that specifically looks at whether AI agents and crawlers can find, open and interpret your content. The tool checks things like bot access via robots.txt, indexing signals such as canonicals, titles and meta robots tags, and technical blockers like client-only rendering and slow responses. A good addition if you mainly want to know where agents get stuck before they even reach your content.
Besides these four tools that show you how agent-ready your site is, the LLM Content Visibility Scanner by Algorythmic, made by Lily Ray, is a handy addition. This tool measures something different: it shows how an LLM sees your page when it fetches it, in other words what's left of your content after an AI has parsed it.
Analyze your site with these tools (they're free and very easy to use) and see which improvement points come out and keep coming back consistently. That gives you a handy first priority list without having to overhaul your entire technical roadmap right away. And each tool highlights slightly different things, so together you get a complete picture of your "AI Agent Score".
In closing
Agent Optimization is the logical next step in a line that runs from optimizing for search engines (SEO) to being mentioned in AI answers (GEO/AEO) to being able to be acted on by agents (Agent Optimization). The three reinforce each other: clean semantic HTML, a clear content structure and stable technical foundations help all three at once. The only difference is that the test changes. With SEO you get found by a crawler. GEO is about being recommended by AI. But if you really want to get serious about AI Search, Agent Optimization has to be an important part of your strategy.
Want to get serious about AI Search? Then Agent Optimization has to be an important part of your strategy.
With Agent Optimization the question is: can an agent on my site actually complete the task it's trying to do on behalf of a customer? It's likely that before long this will be even easier to handle technically and will no longer give you a competitive edge. For now it certainly still does.
