Agent Experience Optimisation
Agent Experience (AX)
Search is no longer just people typing into a box. AI agents, the assistants and autonomous tools built into browsers, operating systems, and apps, are starting to browse, compare, and act on behalf of users. Agent Experience (AX) is the practice of making your website clear and usable to those agents, the same way good UX makes it usable to people. This is an emerging area, popularised by Netlify, and the businesses that get the fundamentals right now will be easier for agents to find and act on as adoption grows.
What agent experience (ax) includes
- Server-side HTML review: ensuring core content and navigation are present without relying on client-side JavaScript an agent may not run
- Structural clarity: predictable layouts, clear headings, and consistent navigation an agent can parse and follow
- Machine-readable data: structured data and clean markup that describe your business, services, and actions unambiguously
- Action legibility: making key tasks (enquiry, booking, contact) reachable and understandable without visual-only cues
- Crawler and agent access review: robots rules and accessibility for legitimate AI agents and crawlers
Who agent experience (ax) is for
Forward-looking businesses that want to be ready as AI agents take on more browsing and buying tasks. Gartner expects around 40% of enterprise applications to use task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, so this matters most for businesses where being discoverable and actionable early is an advantage. It pairs naturally with strong technical SEO foundations.
What you get
A written review of how legible your site is to AI agents, with specific, prioritised changes to structure, markup, and server-side rendering, plus implementation where your platform allows.
My approach
Agent Experience builds directly on solid technical SEO. The same things that help search engines crawl and understand your site (clean server-rendered HTML, predictable structure, and accurate structured data) are what let AI agents read and act on it. The term was popularised by Netlify, who frame AX as making sites clear, structured, and predictable for non-human visitors.
I review whether your most important content and actions are available in the initial HTML, rather than buried behind scripts an agent may never execute. I check that your navigation and page structure are consistent and that key tasks are reachable in a way a machine can follow.
From there I look at the machine-readable layer: the Schema.org structured data that tells an agent what your business is, what it offers, and how to act. This overlaps closely with structuring content for AI and GEO, which focus on being understood and cited by AI answer engines. AX is the sister discipline focused on agents that take action. If you want a starting point, a free audit covers the foundations this builds on.
Frequently asked questions
Is Agent Experience the same as SEO?+
It overlaps heavily but is not identical. SEO optimises for search engines ranking pages for people. Agent Experience optimises for AI agents that read and act on your site directly. The technical foundations are shared, like clean HTML, clear structure, and accurate structured data, which is why getting SEO right is the best first step.
Do I need this now, or is it too early?+
It is genuinely early, and I will be honest about that. The practical work, though, is the same work that improves SEO and accessibility today, so it pays off immediately while also preparing you for wider agent adoption. There is no downside to getting the fundamentals right now.
How is AX different from GEO?+
GEO is about being cited in AI answers like ChatGPT or Perplexity. AX is about being usable by AI agents that browse and complete tasks. GEO is about visibility in answers; AX is about being actionable by software.