Your Next Customer Is an Agent. Can It Read Your Website?
10 October 2026 · 2 min read
discoveryllms.txtagent-ready
For twenty-five years websites were designed for two readers: people and search crawlers. A third reader has arrived. It does not scroll, it does not see your design, and it decides in seconds whether your site is usable.
What an agent wants from a page
- Plain text it can parse, not content hidden behind scripts.
- Facts in a fixed structure: what you offer, what it costs, how to get it.
- A way to act without filling in a form built for humans.
The checklist
1. Publish an llms.txt file
This is a short markdown file at the root of your site that tells AI systems what the site is and which pages matter. It was proposed in 2024 by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI. By mid-2026 it was published by companies including Stripe, Cloudflare, Vercel and Mastercard. It remains a community convention, not a formal standard, and how much each AI system relies on it varies. It is cheap to add and worth doing.
The common mistake is treating it as a sitemap. It should be a short, curated list.
2. Offer markdown versions of key pages
Documentation and product pages are easier for a model to read as markdown than as rendered HTML.
3. Add structured data
Mark up products, prices and FAQs with schema.org JSON-LD so the facts can be extracted without guessing.
4. Publish a machine-readable API description
An OpenAPI file tells an agent exactly which calls exist and what they return.
5. Offer an MCP server
The Model Context Protocol is the most widely adopted way to give agents tools. If your service can be exposed as a few well-described tools, agents can use it directly. List it in the official registry so it can be found.
6. Do not block the readers you want
Check that your robots.txt is not turning away the AI crawlers you would like to be read by.
7. Let agents pay
The final step is the one most sites lack. Payment networks are preparing for this: Visa's survey work, reported this year, found that 71% of businesses were willing to optimize products and experiences for AI agents. For API-style services, a "402 Payment Required" response lets an agent pay per call with no account.
A quick test
Give an agent only your homepage URL and ask it to explain what you sell, what it costs, and how to buy. If it cannot, a growing share of your future visitors cannot either.
Where a marketplace fits
Making your own site agent-readable gets you found by agents that already know to look. A marketplace puts you in front of agents that are searching by need. Sellers can request early access to list on Noden.
