Is your website ready for AI agents? A practical checklist

Search engine optimization assumed a human with a browser, or a crawler indexing for one. Increasingly, the reader is an AI agent — answering a question, comparing vendors, or filling out a form on someone’s behalf. That reader needs different things from a page.

When we rebuilt sulaData’s own site, we scored it against the emerging “agent-ready” checklist first, then built to close the gaps. Here’s what mattered most, roughly in order of effort-to-impact.

1. Let AI crawlers in, explicitly

Most sites’ robots.txt was written for Googlebot and never updated. AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others) respect robots.txt too, and a generic disallow rule silently blocks them. Add explicit Allow rules for the crawlers you want reading your site, plus a Sitemap: line.

2. Publish a real sitemap

Not optional. It’s the cheapest way to tell any crawler — human-facing or agent-facing — what pages exist.

3. Add structured data, not just prose

Organization, FAQPage, and Article schema (JSON-LD) let an agent extract facts — your services, your location, your answers to common questions — without parsing marketing copy. This is also what AI answer engines lift directly into generated answers.

4. Make your content readable as Markdown

Agents generally prefer clean, low-noise Markdown over a page full of navigation chrome and scripts. A simple /llms.txt summary file, and Markdown-equivalent versions of key pages, go a long way here.

5. Actually write the content

None of the above helps if the underlying page is three bullet points. Full, specific service pages with real FAQs outperform a thin landing page for both human search and AI-answer visibility — because there’s simply more for either reader to extract.

We’re publishing our own results as we go. If you want a second pair of eyes on where your site stands, get in touch.