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.
Posts tagged with AI Crawlers
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.