Agent readiness is whether a piece of software, acting on a person's behalf, can use your website. Not visit it, not rank it, use it: fetch a page, work out what the page is about, do the thing the person asked for, and decide whether what it found is worth trusting. Those are four separate questions, and a site can answer any of them with a no while looking perfectly healthy in a browser and in a search console.
We score the four questions out of 100, 25 points each, across 27 checks. The whole rubric is published on /methodology, and this page is the short version of it.
Four questions, 25 points each
The rubric groups its checks into four pillars. Each pillar is a single question, phrased in the rubric exactly as it appears below, and the checks under it are the evidence we collect to answer it.
A. Discovery and access
Can agents find and reach the content at all?
Seven checks, 25 points. Whether robots.txt exists and parses (A1), whether it permits the six major AI crawlers (A2, six points, the heaviest single check in the rubric), whether the XML sitemap is valid and referenced (A3), whether an llms.txt is present with described links (A4), whether bot user agents actually receive a 200 rather than a 403 or 429 (A5), whether the page is dominated by a CAPTCHA, challenge or cookie wall (A6), and how much of the visible text is present in the raw HTML before any JavaScript runs (A7).
Everything else in the rubric depends on this pillar. A site an agent cannot reach has no schema, no forms and no trust signals, whatever it contains.
B. Understanding
Once fetched, can a machine parse what this site is and sells?
Seven checks, 25 points. Parseable JSON-LD on the homepage and on at least half the crawled pages (B1), schema types that match the kind of site it is (B2), one h1, no skipped heading levels and real landmarks (B3), a title, description and Open Graph tags within sane lengths (B4), a clean text ratio of at least 0.10 (B5), alt text on at least 80% of content images (B6), and canonical hygiene across www, non-www, http and https (B7).
Most of this pillar will look familiar to anyone who has done technical SEO. That is not a coincidence, and it is also where the familiarity ends.
C. Actionability
Can an agent actually do things — navigate, search, fill forms, transact?
Six checks, 25 points. Forms with labelled inputs, correct input types and a real submit button (C1), navigation built on anchor elements rather than click-handled divs (C2), buttons that are button elements and can be reached by keyboard (C3), any machine endpoint at all, whether an agents.json, an MCP manifest, API documentation or an OpenAPI spec (C4), commerce paths that work without a login (C5, commerce sites only, redistributed across C1 to C4 for everyone else), and on-site search that uses GET with a query parameter so an agent can build the URL itself (C6).
There is no search engine equivalent of this pillar. Nobody has ever been ranked on whether a program could submit their contact form.
D. Trust and freshness
Should an agent — or the model behind it — trust and cite this site?
Seven checks, 25 points. Valid TLS, an HSTS header and no mixed content (D1), a contact page plus Organization schema with sameAs links (D2), a linked privacy policy and the terms, shipping or returns pages the site type calls for (D3), sitemap lastmod values with at least 20% of URLs modified in the last 90 days (D4), a site name that agrees across the title, og:site_name and schema (D5), a valid security.txt with a future Expires field (D6), and every crawled page returning 200 in under four seconds with a consistent template (D7).
The pillar's premise is that a model deciding whether to cite a page weighs provenance, and provenance is checkable. None of these signals is about reputation. Each is a file, a header or a field that either exists or does not.
Why a site can pass every SEO test and fail all four
The search engine you have optimised for since the 2000s renders your pages in a headless browser, obeys a robots.txt you wrote with its named crawler in mind, and rewards you with a position in a list. Its tests are the right tests for that job.
An agent is doing a different job, and its tests fail in places a search console never looks.
It usually fetches the raw HTML and does not execute your JavaScript. If your content only exists after hydration, the agent sees a shell. That is check A7, and it sits upstream of every other check in the rubric, because schema an agent never receives may as well not exist.
It identifies itself with a user agent string your robots.txt may never mention, and a CDN with a default bot-blocking rule can refuse it before robots.txt is read at all. That is the gap between A2 and A5, and the reason a site can have a perfect robots.txt and still be closed. The Cloudflare post covers the most common version of it.
It then tries to act. A form whose submit is bound to an Enter key handler, a navigation menu made of divs with click listeners, a search box that POSTs, a cart that demands a login before it returns a page: each is invisible to a search engine and a dead end for an agent.
And when it fails, it does not report an error or drop you a position. It uses a site it could read, and nobody on your side finds out. That is the property that makes this problem different in kind from SEO, and the reason we score the four questions rather than one. Agent readiness is not SEO, and not GEO either goes into the overlap and the divergence properly.
What the score is, and what it is not
The score is out of 100 and maps to a grade: 95 to 100 is an A+, 85 to 94 an A, 70 to 84 a B, 55 to 69 a C, 40 to 54 a D, and anything below 40 an F. Every check carries an effort rating, Low, Medium or High, so the fixes can be ranked by cost as well as by points. The three tiers of fixes explains what each rating involves.
The rubric is versioned. This page describes version 1.0.1. When a check changes, the version is bumped, the change is logged on /methodology, and scores issued under the old version are never restated. Why we publish the rubric is the argument for doing it this way.
The free scan is deliberately shallow: six pages, a fixed set of probes, no judgement. It is good at telling you that something is wrong and roughly how much it costs you. Every finding it reports carries the evidence it captured, and a finding with no evidence is not published. If you want the same checks run by a person who reads your templates rather than inferring them, that is the paid audit.
We are scored against this rubric ourselves, and the result is public at /site/agentfriendlyrank.com, including anything we have not yet fixed. Selling agent readiness from a site nobody had audited would be absurd.
Check your own site
Run the free scan and you will get a score against these four questions, check by check, with the evidence behind each one. The full definitions are on the methodology page, starting with discovery and access and continuing through understanding, actionability and trust and freshness.