The agent-readiness checklist: 12 things to check before an AI agent shops for your customer
A twelve-point checklist for whether AI agents can find your business, read it, transact with it and trust it. You can work through it in an afternoon.
This is the checklist behind our free assessment, written out so you can run it yourself. It takes an afternoon if your site is in decent shape and longer if it isn’t. Work through it in order, because the early items are the ones that block everything after them.
Find: can an agent find you?
1. Your robots.txt and bot protection let agents in
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for lines disallowing AI bots or a blanket block. Many hosts and plugins added these in 2024 by default. The bots do different jobs, so decide on each one. OAI-SearchBot feeds ChatGPT’s search and shopping, while GPTBot is OpenAI’s training crawler, and you can allow one without the other. Google-Extended controls Gemini’s use of your content and has nothing to do with Google Search. ClaudeBot, Meta-ExternalAgent and PerplexityBot follow the same pattern. If you want agent traffic, allow the search and retrieval bots, and treat training as a separate decision.
Robots.txt is only part of it, though, because Muse doesn’t use a crawler name. It runs a real browser on a Meta server and visits your site the way a person would, so your robots.txt rules don’t govern it, but your CDN’s or host’s bot-blocking settings do. Amazon reportedly blocked it that way in September. If you use an aggressive bot-fighting mode, a CAPTCHA in front of booking or checkout, or a strict firewall, an agent can be turned away silently. Before you loosen anything, check your server logs for challenged or blocked traffic on those pages, and then loosen only what the agent needs.
2. Your listings agree with each other
Your name, address, phone, hours and website should match across your site, Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Yelp, Facebook and Instagram. Any mismatch reduces an agent’s confidence that they’re all one business.
3. Your homepage says what you are in plain text
Don’t rely only on a hero image or a video to say it. The first text an agent reads should say what you do, where you do it, and who it’s for.
4. You have an llms.txt
It’s optional, but it’s cheap to add. Here’s what to put in it.
Understand: can an agent read you?
5. Business markup is present and correct
Your markup should use LocalBusiness (or the specific subtype) and include your address, hours, phone, price range, service area and sameAs links to your other profiles. Run your homepage through Google’s Rich Results Test to check it. We cover the types that matter in more detail here.
6. Prices are stated as text and marked up
Every service or product that you’d want an agent to recommend has a price (or a starting price, or a range) on an HTML page, marked up as an Offer. A photo of a menu or a PDF price list fails this item.
7. Policies are on a page an agent can read
Your policies on cancellation, deposits, returns, warranties and service area boundaries are in plain HTML on a page linked from your footer, ideally with FAQPage markup.
8. Common questions are answered
These include whether you take walk-ins, whether you accept a given insurance, or whether you deliver to a given zip code. A FAQ page with markup lets an agent answer them without a phone call.
Transact: can an agent transact with you?
9. Booking or checkout works without a human
Open a private browser window, don’t log in, and try to complete a booking or purchase. Note every place that requires an account, a CAPTCHA, a popup, a phone call, or a form field with no clear instructions. Each one is a place where an agent may give up.
10. Your booking system exposes real availability
If you take appointments, does your booking tool show open slots that an agent could select, or is it a “request a time and we’ll confirm” form? The first kind works with agents, and the second mostly doesn’t, at least not yet.
11. You support the protocols, or your platform does
If you sell products, that means an ACP-compatible feed and a UCP profile at the well-known URL on your domain. We explain ACP vs UCP for business owners in a separate post. If you run a service business, check what your booking platform has shipped for agent access.
Trust: can an agent trust you?
12. Your review history holds up when a machine reads it
That means recent reviews, a response to each negative one, ratings that are consistent across platforms, and specifics in reviews that match what you claim on your site. An agent reads all of it and doesn’t stop at the star average.
Scoring yourself
Mark each item as passed, failed, or not tested. This is a practical checklist. It isn’t a validated prediction of whether an agent will recommend you. Treat the items that block a customer outright (a checkout that fails, a price nobody can read, a firewall that turns agents away) as more urgent than the ones that help at the margin, like llms.txt.
If you only fix four items, fix 1, 5, 6 and 9. Crawler access and business markup are what get you considered, text prices get you evaluated fairly, and a working checkout is what gets you chosen.
If you’d rather have someone run this against your business and tell you where you land, request a free assessment. It covers all twelve items and ranks the fixes by how much they’d move the score.
Find out what the assistants see when they look at your business
The assessment is free. A person checks where you stand in search and AI answers, runs the four agent checks (Find, Understand, Transact, Trust) and tries to book or buy, then emails you a one-page report with the three fixes we think matter most.