Your website has a new audience: Preparing for the age of AI agents

A potential client is evaluating your company. Instead of visiting your website, they ask an AI assistant a question, receive a summary, and form an opinion based on what it says. Whether your business is mentioned, and whether it’s represented accurately, depends increasingly on how well AI systems can read and interpret your site’s content.

AI is changing how people find information

AI systems are becoming regular consumers of the web, and agentic bots now represent more than half of the internet’s traffic. They read, summarise, compare, and increasingly act on information without a human ever loading the page. As a result, website traffic is no longer the only meaningful measure of online visibility. Being referenced in AI-generated responses is becoming just as important. Most websites are accessible to AI systems by default, but few have been deliberately structured to help them understand the content accurately and confidently. The shift isn’t hypothetical. AI-enhanced search experiences such as Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are already reducing click-through rates, with some studies reporting declines of 58%. People increasingly get the information they need directly from search results or an AI assistant, without ever visiting the underlying website.

At the same time, AI-driven browsing is growing rapidly. Adobe Analytics reported a 4,700% year-over-year increase in generative AI referrals to US retail sites by mid-2025, while HUMAN Security found AI agent and agentic browser traffic increased more than 78-fold over the following year. Together, these trends suggest that AI systems are becoming an increasingly important audience for web content.

AI agents don’t see websites like humans do

A website can look polished and work perfectly for human visitors, yet still be difficult for an AI system to interpret. People experience the rendered page, AI systems interpret the information they can extract from its underlying structure. Depending on the task, an AI system might analyse the page’s HTML, follow its accessibility structure, or use vision models to interpret a screenshot. Each approach reveals different information, but none sees the page exactly as a person does. If important information is only conveyed visually, buried in JavaScript, or implied rather than stated explicitly, an AI system may miss or misinterpret it. This is what agent readiness is about. Traditional SEO helps people discover your website by improving its visibility in search results. Agent readiness helps AI systems understand, trust, and use your content accurately, whether they are answering a question, comparing suppliers, or interacting with your services programmatically. Visibility still matters, but being easily interpreted by machines is becoming increasingly important.

From reading to taking action

AI systems are beginning to move beyond reading and summarising web pages to taking actions on a user’s behalf. They can check availability, retrieve live information, complete forms, and interact with online services directly.

This shift is still in its early stages, and it does not fundamentally change what most websites need to do today. It does reinforce the value of getting the foundations right. A website that is easy for AI systems to understand and interpret will be better positioned as agents become more capable and more common.

Why agent readiness matters now

Getting your site ready for AI does not mean rebuilding it from scratch. Many of the foundations that make a site easier for AI systems to understand overlap with good technical SEO, accessibility, and content practices that well-built websites already follow.

But there is still an opportunity to get ahead. Most websites have not been designed with AI systems in mind. Only a small percentage have explicitly declared AI usage preferences, and adoption of emerging standards for machine-readable access remains limited. The majority of the web is still catching up.

We have seen similar shifts before. SEO evolved from a technical consideration into a core part of digital visibility. Mobile readiness followed a similar path, moving from an emerging concern to an expectation. Agent readiness is likely to follow the same trajectory: the companies that build the foundations early will be better positioned as AI-mediated discovery becomes more common.

What’s next: Putting agent readiness into practice

This is the first part of a two-part series on making your website ready for a web where AI systems play a larger role in how people discover and evaluate businesses. In the next article, we’ll move from principles to practice, exploring how we applied agent-readiness ideas to our own website: what we changed, why we made those choices, and where we decided not to invest yet.