Blog Playbooks · Agent Ready · Part 1
The four questions an AI agent asks your website
Can it get in, can it understand you, can it do something, and can it finish? A plain guide to what makes a local business website agent ready, with the points each fix is worth.
More of your customers are about to stop visiting your website themselves. They will ask an assistant to do it: find a gym with a free trial near me, book a facial for Saturday, get a quote for twelve locations. The assistant reads your site, and either gets the job done or moves on to the next business.
Agent Ready scores that in four parts. Each part is a question the agent is asking, and each carries a weight in the final score out of 100.
Source: Agent Ready scoring method
Act carries the most weight on purpose. A website an agent can read but not use is a brochure.
1. Can it get in?
Start with robots.txt, the file that tells robots what they may read. Some sites block AI crawlers there, and some of those crawlers are not training scrapers at all. ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User are assistants doing a job for a person, right now.
Then check for a bot wall. If your firewall greets every visitor with a "checking your browser" challenge, a real agent hitting your site never gets past it. That is a setting in your firewall, not your website, and it usually needs a person with Cloudflare access to change.
2. Does it understand you?
An agent should not have to guess what you sell from your design. Give it three things.
- Structured data
One block of JSON-LD in your page head with your business name, real address, phone, hours and services. Worth 10 points. Only use facts you can stand behind: an agent will repeat them.
- A sitemap
A list of your pages at /sitemap.xml, referenced from robots.txt. Worth 4 points.
- An llms.txt briefing
A short Markdown file at /llms.txt naming the business, what it sells, who it serves and the pages that matter. Worth 4 points, and the cheapest fix on the list.
3. Can it do something?
This is where most sites fail, and where the points are.
Source: Agent Ready checks
Start with the easy ones. Put your phone number in the page as a tel: link and your email as a mailto: link, not as an image or text drawn by a script. Give every form field a real label, a name and an autocomplete hint such as email or tel. That also fixes your accessibility, because a screen reader needs exactly the same things.
Then the big one. WebMCP lets your page hand an agent a short list of real actions: check availability, request a quote, book. The agent shares the visitor's browser session, so there are no keys or passwords to hand out.
Never register a tool that returns a guess. An agent will tell a customer to turn up at 2pm on Thursday, and nobody will be expecting them.
4. Can it finish?
The last questions are about friction at the finish line. A captcha on a booking form stops an agent cold. So does a price list behind a login, a form that rate limits a second attempt, or a booking widget buried in three nested iframes.
Be careful here. A captcha on a login, a checkout or a password reset is doing a real job. The fix is to scope protection to the pages that need it, never to remove it to gain points.
