Is your website invisible to AI agents?

A new kind of visitor is arriving on websites: software that reads, compares and acts on behalf of a person. Ask an AI assistant to "find me a winter coat in my size under £80" or "book the garage with the soonest slot" and it will go out, read sites, and come back with an answer — or a booking. If your site is built only for human eyes, an agent has to scrape, guess, and often give up. This post explains what makes a site legible to agents, and how to check where yours stands.

What "agent-ready" actually means

It is not one thing. It is three layers, and most sites are missing the top two.

• Discover — can an agent find the machine-readable parts of your site without scraping every page? This is robots rules, sitemaps, and newer signals like llms.txt.
• Read — once it arrives, can it get clean content instead of a wall of markup, pop-ups and layout? Serving a Markdown version of a page on request is the simplest win here.
• Act — can it do something useful: get a quote, check stock, start a booking — through a described, safe interface rather than by reverse-engineering your forms?

A site can be excellent for humans and score near zero on all three. The two are not the same problem.

Why this matters now

Two things changed in 2025–26. Agents got good enough to be trusted with real tasks, and the standards for talking to them started to settle — llms.txt, content negotiation for Markdown, the /.well-known/ discovery files, and tool-description formats like MCP. None of it is mandatory yet. That is precisely the opportunity: the sites that become legible early are the ones agents will reach for first, the same way early, well-structured sites won search a decade ago.

What invisibility costs you

Today, not much — agent traffic is still small. But it compounds. When an assistant is choosing between three shops and only one publishes a clean, machine-readable description of what it sells and how to buy, that shop wins the recommendation. The cost of being invisible is not a sudden drop; it is quietly never being in the set the agent considers.

How to check in ten seconds

You do not have to guess. AgentVisible scans your site for the practical signals agents look for, scores it, and tells you in plain English what is missing and what to publish first.

Run a free scan and see where your site stands. No sign-up, just a URL.

If the score is low, that is normal — almost every site is starting from here. The useful part is the list of fixes, in priority order.