AI agents are turning up on real websites already. ChatGPT can browse and book. Perplexity can compare and recommend. Google's AI mode can answer a question about your business without ever sending anyone to your homepage. In the last six months, Stripe, OpenAI, Google, Visa and Mastercard have all shipped infrastructure that lets agents discover and pay businesses on a customer's behalf. The buyer's agent is arriving with intent already formed, and sometimes with payment authority already attached. Your homepage does not get to fire. The only question that matters is whether the agent can use you when it gets there.
The audit
Run through these. If you cannot tick most of them, your site is invisible to anything except a person sat at a browser typing.
Can AI find you?
- Your robots.txt does not block AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended)
- You publish an llms.txt at the root of your domain
- You have a sitemap that lists every important page
- Your important pages have descriptive titles and meta descriptions
Can AI understand what your business does?
- You have Schema.org markup that says what kind of business you are (LocalBusiness, Organization, Service, Product)
- Your name, address and phone number match what is on your Google Business profile
- Your opening hours are on the site as readable text, not just inside an image
- Your services or products are listed as text, not buried in a brochure PDF
Can AI read your prices and the basics?
- Prices are on the page as text, not locked inside an image or a PDF
- You do not hide pricing behind a "contact us for a quote" wall on services where you could quote a range
- Policies that affect a purchase decision (delivery times, returns, cancellation, deposits) are written out, not just mentioned in passing
- Your contact details are crawlable, not locked inside a contact form
Can AI describe you to a human without getting it wrong?
- Your Open Graph tags and meta descriptions match what your business does today
- The description of your business is consistent across your homepage, about page, social profiles and Google Business
- Old offers, expired pages and previous business names are removed or clearly archived
- Your homepage has a clear one-line description of what you do, readable in the first half second
Most websites tick a few of these. Almost none tick most. That is the gap.
Run the free 60-second visibility scan and see how your site scores on the first set of checks above.
What "agent-ready" means in practice
The same checks apply whether you are a business owner with a Squarespace site, a vibe coder shipping your first project, or a developer who has built plenty of sites but never thought about how AI tools read them. The platform you used to build it does not change the question. The agent at the door is the same agent.
There is a load of new SEO language being thrown around at the moment (Generative Engine Optimisation, Answer Engine Optimisation, Agentic SEO). Most of it is about being mentioned in an AI's answer. Being mentioned is a start. Being right, and being usable, is the bar.
Agent-ready comes down to three things working together. AI tools can find your site and read it. They understand what you are, where you are and what you sell or offer. And what they tell a visitor matches what the visitor will actually get when they walk in, click buy, or send a message. If any of the three is broken, you can be the most recommended site in your category and still lose every visitor, because they turned up at the wrong address, asked about a service you stopped offering last year, or expected a price you never charged.
Why now, not in two years
The infrastructure that lets agents act on a customer's behalf is being put in place this year:
- Stripe has shipped agent payment tooling (Links Wallet and the Machine Payments Protocol)
- OpenAI and Stripe have shipped the Agentic Commerce Protocol
- Google has shipped the Universal Commerce Protocol across Gemini and Shopping
- Visa and Mastercard are both rolling out agent payment token systems
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity have all moved well past "search results" and into "give me a recommendation I can act on"
The businesses that fix the basics in the next six to twelve months get into the answers, get into the training data, and become the default recommendation when an agent needs an option in your category. That position is sticky. Businesses that wait will find someone else already sitting in the slot.
This is the same shape as mobile-first in 2010 and Google Business Profile in 2014. The owners who took the shift seriously while it was early built distribution that lasted. The ones who waited paid extra to catch up.
What to do this week
1. Publish an llms.txt at the root of your domain
One plain text file that tells AI tools what your business does, where the important pages are, and how to describe you. An hour of work. It costs nothing. It puts you in the pipeline that feeds AI training and discovery.
Good for: any business with a website.
The catch: adoption is still early. Not every AI tool reads it yet. Treat it as a floor, not a ceiling.
If you would rather have us write and deploy it for you, run the free visibility scan first so we know what your site needs.
2. Get your Schema.org markup right
Schema.org is the standard that tells search engines and AI tools what kind of business you are. LocalBusiness for a shop, restaurant or service business with a location. Organization for an online or remote business. Service or Product entries for what you sell. Most small business sites either have nothing at all, or they have old markup that says they are a different kind of business than they really are now.
Good for: every small business, especially anything with a physical location.
The catch: wrong markup is worse than no markup. If your site claims you are a restaurant but you are a dentist, every AI that reads you will be confused. Worth getting checked.
3. Make your prices, hours, services and contact info readable as text
Prices in images do not get read. PDFs do not get read reliably. "Contact us for a quote" pages tell an AI nothing useful. Walk through your top ten pages and ask one question: if someone stripped out every image and every PDF, would the page still tell a reader what you sell, what you charge, when you are open, where you are, and how to get hold of you? If the answer is no, fix the worst offender first.
Good for: any business whose homepage relies on images or downloads to communicate the basics.
The catch: you may have to write some things out loud that were previously hidden inside a design. That is a feature, not a bug.
If your business has an API, or could
Everything above is the baseline. It makes sure your site can be found, read, understood and described accurately by AI tools. For most small businesses, that is enough to compete properly.
If you sell software, run a service with bookable inventory, manage data that other people might want to query, or otherwise have something programmable to offer, the next step is to make it queryable by agents directly. That means a clean API for the parts of your business agents would care about, plus an MCP server wrapping your most popular endpoints.
An MCP server is a small piece of software that lets any AI agent talk to your API without scraping or guesswork. Developers building agents in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Cline are already wiring businesses like that straight into their tools. Those businesses become the default option when an agent needs something in your category.
That is a different kind of project, and it is where a lot of my work at AI with Ash sits. If that is the direction you are heading, book a call and I can talk through what it would look like for your business.
How I help
At AI with Ash, I work with SMEs, vibe coders and fresh developers to support them in getting their tech stack right and to integrate AI meaningfully and above all, safely. If you would like to know where your site sits today, run the free AI visibility scan. It takes about 60 seconds and you will get a score plus a list of what to fix.
If you would rather talk it through with me (Ash), book a call and I will walk through what is worth doing for you.