How to audit your site's agent readiness
An AI agent that books a table, compares prices or fills in a quote form has to read your page, find the right control and use it. Plenty of sites that look fine to people fall apart at one of those steps. Here's how to check yours.
1. Pick one real task
Not "the homepage." A task: find the price of your main service, request a quote, book a slot. Agent readiness is about finishing something, so test the thing your customers actually come to do.
2. Do it with JavaScript off
Many agents and AI crawlers fetch HTML and never run scripts. Turn JavaScript off and try to read the page and reach the next step. If the content or the links disappear, fetch-only agents are stuck at step one. See To an AI crawler, your homepage has zero links.
3. Do it again with JavaScript on, keyboard only
Many browser-driving agents read the page through its accessibility tree, the same structure screen readers use. If you can't finish the task with Tab, Enter and the arrow keys, an agent is likely to struggle too.
4. Check the controls
- Links are
<a href>and buttons are<button>. A<div>with a click handler has no role an agent can recognize. - Every form field has a
<label>or another accessible name. "Field 3" tells an agent nothing. - Errors say what's wrong in text, next to the field, not only in red.
5. Check for walls
- Consent banners that cover the content until someone clicks.
- Pop-ups on load or on scroll.
- Bot challenges and CAPTCHAs on pages an agent needs, such as pricing or booking. Protect logins and checkouts if you must; don't challenge the pages that only describe what you sell.
6. Time it
How long until the main content exists in the page? Agents wait, but not forever. A page that assembles itself over several seconds of scripts is a page some agents give up on.
The fix
Fix in this order: content in the raw HTML, real links and buttons, labeled forms, then walls. Every step also helps people who use assistive technology, so none of it is wasted if agents take longer to arrive than the hype says.
The free AI Agent Readiness check (my own product) flags the structural problems on a page in one pass. It's a heuristic and doesn't run a live agent, so step 1 is still yours.