What is Agent Engine Optimization (AgEO)?
Agent engine optimization (AgEO) is making your site usable by AI agents that act on a person’s behalf: reading pages reliably, following links, and, where relevant, completing tasks through APIs or tools. AgEO is our shorthand, not an industry standard.
What do agents need from a website?
- Proven Content in text, not only in images or scripts, and pages that load without special steps.
- Proven Crawling and fetching allowed for the bots you want, in robots.txt and at the CDN or firewall.
- Practice Clean semantic HTML, descriptive link text, stable URLs, and forms with proper labels.
- Practice Clear pricing, policies and contact details stated in plain text.
- Experimental Agent-specific protocols and files such as MCP server cards, WebMCP and NLWeb. These are drafts or proposals and are still changing.
Do I need an MCP server?
Only if you want agents to do something on your site, such as run a tool or place an order, rather than only read it. For a publication, clean readable pages come first. We will cover protocols as they stabilize.