Agents are already browsing your website, filling out your forms, and reading your documentation. But ask most teams what "agent ready" means, and you'll get a shrug. It's not one technical fix. It's five practices, split across two categories: telling agents things, and letting them act. Most of it doesn't require a developer.

I'll walk through the full path, the protocol landscape behind it, and where to start with getting your website ready for the agentic web.

Normally, I'd start a talk like this by explaining what an agent is. Not today. You're living it if your team is using Claude Skills to get real work done. Agents aren't coming. They're here.

That matters because agents use the web differently than humans do. They complete tasks for people, and they complete tasks for other agents. In his MozCon New York 2026 talk, Eric Siu put it well: wheels within wheels, one agent looping into another. The web is being rebuilt with a parallel, machine-forward path running alongside the human one.

So the question isn't whether to prepare for this. It's what to actually do. Here's the path I use: five steps, split across two categories - telling agents things, and letting them act.

Nobody builds an agent to sit around. Agents exist to complete tasks, for humans and for other agents. When you build a website, make sure you give it something to do.

1. Increase transactable elements on-site. Add forms, product pages, booking pages, downloads: anywhere a person, or an agent acting on their behalf, can actually do something instead of just reading. This is the easiest place to start because anyone can do it. You don't need to be technical. Just go to your page and ask: is there something here to click, download, book, or buy?

2. Update your documentation and support pages. Don’t forget that agents relay instructions, both to people and to other agents. Think about the sticker on your car door that tells you the tire pressure. I once asked my AI to walk me through filling my tires, and it told me to check the door for that exact sticker, because it knew that's where the information lives. If your business has something that needs explaining, a hard-to-find entrance, a multi-step process, or how to use your product, write it down clearly. This is a content team's job, not a developer's, but it will help the agent to help you.

3. Use clear CTAs with correct HTML. Move past "click here." Say "buy now," "book this," whatever the action actually is, and use the right HTML elements so agents and screen readers can parse the intent.

4. Build for screen-reader navigation. Agentic browsers read your site the same way screen readers do, through ARIA tags and structural markup.  And don't forget your search bar. A site search is a great tool for human accessibility, but agents also use it as a shortcut straight to what they need.  If you've been pushing for accessibility improvements, this is your case for why it matters now more than ever.

5. Guide agentic actions with content. Reduce inaccuracies across your domain. If one page says your entrance is on Sixth Street and another says Seventh, the agent has no way to know which is true. Don’t make the agent work; give them what they need by improving factual accuracy across your site. 

Building clearer knowledge bases and support docs, and thinking about CTAs - none of this requires a developer. If you're on the content team, you're already in this.

Agentic optimization comes in two flavors:

1. Declarative optimizations that tell the agent something. 
2. Imperative optimizations that let the agent do something. 

Almost every protocol you'll hear about sorts cleanly into one of the two.

Declarative optimization: tell the agent

This is where you hand over relevant information, instructions, your standard operating procedure, negative constraints, and reference documents. The tactics that deliver it are GEO, WebMCP, protocol compliance, and llms.txt.

GEO

Start with GEO, because it's the foundation that everything else sits on. Agents use base models like ChatGPT 4.0 for general knowledge and text generation, so however visible you are in that training data shapes how an agent describes you later. 

In my book, The New Rules of AI Search, I explain that agentic optimization should be part of your considerations for AI search dominance, but it goes both ways. 

Picture a fictional shoe brand, Aerion Shoes. Someone asks an agentic shopping browser if a pair of Aerion runners would work for a marathon. The agent gives an honest review, says they're better for daily training than race day, and recommends two competitors instead. 

That's not malice. That's just what the training data says. Your GEO work today is what an agent will say about you tomorrow.

Declarative web protocols

The AI landscape is awash with web protocols at the moment, but there’s a reason why. As websites and web platforms develop, web protocols are providing the rules, guidelines, and guardrails to help agents behave safely and consistently. This is essentially a new segment of the web being built in real time, so these protocols are essential.

An Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) profile, for example, spells out declarative guidance, data feed specs, access point standards, A2A (Agent to Agent) identification, security guardrails, and what your agentic system needs before it can participate in commerce transactions. Under A2A specifically, you'll also declare an agent card, a file at a known URL that states your agent's name, capabilities, and endpoints.

Implementing protocols can be complex for smaller businesses and may require a developer, but through partnerships and collaboration (see step 5), compliance can be accessible to businesses of all sizes.

WebMCP

One protocol that is worth mentioning specifically for onsite optimization is WebMCP, which acts as the essential bridge for browser-level agent interactions and agents. Introduced by Google at I/O 2026, it enables a direct conversation between your website and the browser's built-in agent. In practice, this means that you can use it as a declarative tool to optimize your site's architecture by adding agent-friendly metadata to your forms and interactive elements, allowing the browser to parse and utilize them effectively.

LLMs.txt

The one declarative tool worth spending real time on is llms.txt, and its longer sibling, llms-full.txt. To be clear, LLMs.txt v.1 was widely touted as a tool for GEO growth, but research has not shown that to be the case. What has emerged is that LLMs.txt is has multiple use cases for agentic optimization. In Google Chrome’s Agentic Browsing audit, there is a dedicated check for llms.txt because “Without this file, agents may spend more time crawling the site to understand its high-level structure and primary content.”

Anthropic still includes it in their resources for AI ingestion, and Stripe, Mastercard, OpenAI, and Anthropic all reference or use it in their own agentic infrastructure. Every Wix website on a premium domain has an agentic LLMs.txt.

Imperative optimization: enable the agent

Imperative agent optimizations let AI agents carry out actions, access your APIs, reach your site data directly, and connect to MCP. The tactics are WebMCP again, MCP, API selection, and NL Web.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

MCP is core to your agentic stack, full stop. If you publish your own MCP, your website becomes part of an agent's everyday toolkit. We use Monday's MCP constantly for that reason. Wix has its own MCP live in Claude, Cursor, and Perplexity Pro. 

As a tool, MCP allows agents to carry out single and cross functional work flow. For instance, the Wix MCP, also serves as a key component behind the Wix Headless CMS.This means that agents in Base44, Claude, or Cursor can create and update websites with a prompt. 

For SASS teams, opening up the capabilities of your tools with MCP is essentially product led SEO, because you will show in more responses as a result of being able to provide more solutions.

WebMCP

WebMCP's imperative side lets the browser expose parts of your site so an agent can act directly from the browser instead of navigating your interface like a human would.
For instance the Wix WebMCP app provides a "tool menu" for agents by activating the Wix MCP. This means that an agent can instantly find products or complete tasks without manual clicking when using an agentic browser. 

API

API selection is the least new part of this whole stack. You've been using APIs for years. What's new is auditing them for agent interoperability. PayPal didn't invent a new protocol for agentic shopping. They reconfigured their existing APIs so agents could use them. Look at your own stack the same way.

NLWeb

Last is NL Web, Microsoft's project, invented by Ramanathan Guha, the same person who gave us schema.org. An agent sends your site a natural language query. NL Web checks it against your own structured data and generates a response grounded in what's actually on your site, not the model's general knowledge. 

That means everything you've already built for schema is doing double duty:

The structured data work you've already done as a good SEO qualifies you for the agentic web.

The agentic web is moving fast, and you won't build it all yourself. Audit whether your existing partners are actually building for agent interoperability, not just talking about it.

Wix is the first CMS to become an official signatory of the Agentic Commerce Protocol, so merchants can sell through Instant Checkout in ChatGPT via our integration with Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite. We did the same with PayPal, which now puts Wix catalogs in front of agents on surfaces like Perplexity. And we connected to NLWeb with one click, because it makes a site more discoverable to AI agents and tools. 

Look at your own merchant dashboard: agentic commerce, AI-powered chat, these should already be showing up as channels, not add-ons.

A few numbers worth sharing from our own rollout. Every Wix site ships with automatic structured data, a Site MCP, and llms.txt by default. Wix Smart Chat already acts as a merchant's first agent. We're also in Gemini Spark's growing roster of partners, alongside companies like Adobe, Asana, and HubSpot.

The checklist is short: 

• Review your partners for agentic interoperability
• Look for native integrations already in place
• Favor partners who are building and using agents themselves
• If your partners aren’t there yet, ask them directly what's on the roadmap

You don't need to be technical for this, and you don't need to start with something that could break your stack.

Create agents inside tools you already use before building from scratch. Try free courses from Microsoft, Google, or LangChain. Use a no-code AI agent builder like Base44 if you want to connect across your existing stack without writing anything. If you want to go deeper, Google's Agent Developer Kit is there for it. We built our own AI Front Desk Agent this way, using Wix Harmony, as a starting point before going further.

One more thing worth knowing about: AGENTS.md. It's a simple, open format for guiding coding agents, already used by more than 60,000 open source projects. Think of it as a README, but for agents: one dedicated place to give a coding agent the context and instructions it needs to work on your project correctly.

The agentic web isn't coming. It's already in your browser, your tool stack, and, increasingly, your customers' tool stack, too.

Dedicated agents are showing up in agent marketplaces now, where folks can essentially buy an employee. They're built into LLM chat interfaces. And they're moving into search itself, like Gemini's evolving search bar.

If you want to see who's actually active, Cloudflare's Bots Directory lists signed agents by region and category, along with real activity signals. It's a quick way to tell which agents are worth paying attention to and which are just noise.

Because this space changes weekly, agent readiness isn't a project you finish. It's a practice you keep running.