Is your website agent-ready? A practical checklist
AI agents now crawl, read, and act on websites the way search engines used to. Here is a practical, standards-graded checklist for making your site agent-ready, and what to skip for now.
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Web Bot Auth explained: what RFC 9421 signing proves
Web Bot Auth lets a crawler cryptographically sign its requests instead of relying on a spoofable User-Agent string. Here is how the RFC 9421 mechanics actually work, who really signs requests today, and what the spec still leaves unresolved.
DNS-AID explained: what it is and why it isn't settled yet
DNS-AID proposes publishing AI agents through DNS records instead of well-known URIs. Here is what the draft actually specifies, what the Linux Foundation launch means, and why the record shape is still inconsistent across every implementation we checked.
Domain monitoring vs DNS monitoring: what each catches
Domain monitoring and DNS monitoring watch two different layers of the same name: registration versus resolution. Here is what each one catches, where they overlap at the nameserver, and which layer catches which outage, so you know why you need both.
How to detect domain hijacking early
Domain hijacking shows up in the registration record before you lose the name: a transfer lock removed, a pendingTransfer flag, a nameserver or registrant rewrite. Here is how to detect domain hijacking early by watching WHOIS and RDAP, with the perl.com case as the lesson.
Domain expiry monitoring: catch it before the outage
Domain expiry monitoring reads your domain's WHOIS or RDAP record on a schedule and warns you weeks ahead, so a missed renewal never takes your site, email, and certificates offline at the same time. Here is the expiry lifecycle, how to check it, and how to alert in time.
How to detect DNS record changes
Detecting DNS record changes is a snapshot-and-diff loop on top of dig and the SOA serial. The hard part is not the detection, it is filtering the false positives from GeoDNS, round-robin, and CDN IP rotation so you only alert on changes that matter.
What DNS monitoring catches (and what it can't)
DNS monitoring catches the silent failures an uptime check never shows: records pointing at the wrong server, nameservers out of sync, expired DNSSEC signatures, broken email records. Here is exactly what it catches, what it cannot, and how to start with dig.
How to check SSL certificate expiration
Checking an SSL certificate's expiration takes ten seconds with a browser or openssl. The real problem: certificate lifespans have already dropped to 200 days and reach 47 by 2029, so a once-a-year manual check no longer protects you. Here is how to check, and how to automate it.
llms.txt and AI crawler indexability: does it work?
llms.txt still does almost nothing for AI search citations, and a 137,000-site study found 97% of files never get fetched. But in 2026 Google moved it into a new agentic browsing standard alongside WebMCP. Here is what changed, and when llms.txt is still worth adding.
GEO vs SEO: What actually changes in your content
GEO is SEO with one extra job: getting cited inside AI assistant responses. The 2023 paper that coined the term tested 9 content interventions. Four worked strongly, three gave moderate gains, and two flatlined or backfired, including classic keyword stuffing.
Should you block AI crawlers? Honest answer for 2026
Most sites should allow AI training crawlers in 2026: invisibility in AI assistant answers now costs more than uncrawled-for-training saves. Here is the per-provider breakdown (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) and the robots.txt for each realistic decision.
Website downtime cost: deconstructing the famous numbers
The famous downtime cost numbers (Gartner's $5,600/min, IDC's $1M/hour) come from enterprise IT surveys that rarely apply to most sites. Here is where each one comes from, why it overstates the cost for most businesses, and a calculation framework that does apply.
How often should you check uptime: the honest answer
Picking an uptime check interval is not a question of "as fast as your plan allows." It is a question of which failure mode you are catching and how fast the world needs to know it is broken. Here is how to pick by impact, plus the alert latency math vendors rarely show.
robots.txt vs llms.txt vs sitemap.xml: what each is for
Three small files with three different jobs. robots.txt controls who crawls, sitemap.xml maps what to crawl, and llms.txt curates what AI assistants read first. Get the mental model right with minimum-viable examples and the mistakes that confuse them.