From ranking to recommended: get your site ready to thrive in the age of AI agents

Your next customer may not find you through a search engine. Instead, they'll ask an AI assistant: "how do I do X?"; "which option is best for someone like me?"; "just handle it for me" and an agent will find the answer, weigh the options, and act on their behalf. Increasingly, the moment that determines whether a customer chooses you happens inside a model's response — before a human ever sees your homepage. This agentic audience is already here: by our count, fewer than half of all HTML page requests now come from a human . Not all of those machines are agents acting for a person, but that share is growing fast, and answer engines, shopping assistants, and research tools will shape which businesses are found and recommended. Discoverability used to mean ranking on a results page. Now it means being found, read, and confidently recommended by the agents that guide your customers. The old metrics, human clicks and page views, no longer paint the full picture. We spent time talking to site owners who were staring at access logs full of AI bots, completely blind to whether those bots were capable of using their site or recommending their products and services to their users. We heard two main questions: Can agents actually use my site? Am I getting recommended? To help site owners answer these questions, we have integrated our previous work on Agent Readiness into the Cloudflare dashboard, and added our new Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) tool as well. These tools treat agents as a core user base for your site, showing you how an agent will see it, and how often you get recommended. The opportunity is big, and the bar is low, because most sites aren't built for this user yet. Just as early SEO rewarded the sites built for search engines, the sites built for agents will be rewarded now. The ones that are easy to find, read, and trust are the ones agents will recommend. Diagnostics: is your site ready for agents? Diagnostics is the technical checkup within Agent Readiness. It scans your site the way an agent reads it: it works out whether it's allowed in and whether it can discover your content, fetches a clean machine-readable copy, and finds the interfaces it can call. While a person just loads your homepage, an agent leans on your robots.txt, your sitemap, your response headers, a Markdown version of your content, and published metadata for authentication and tools. Diagnostics runs those checks against a hostname and rolls the resul...