Standards for the Machine-Readable Website

Saw this from Garry Tan:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrytan/recent-activity/all/

Then ended up here:
https://x.com/flynnjamm/status/2023465136204419096?s=46

And I couldn’t stop thinking about one thing:

How do you sell to agents?

Not humans.
Not people clicking blue links.
Agents.

The shift is real

Search clicks are dropping.

• Gartner says traditional search volume could fall ~25% by 2026.
• Ahrefs saw ~34% lower CTR when Google AI Overviews show up.
• Publisher referrals from Google are down ~30%+ globally.

People are getting answers without visiting sites.

SEO was built for clicks.
Agents are built for extraction.

Bots are everywhere

AI bot traffic is up 300%+ (Akamai).

More machines reading your site than humans.

But your site?
Still written for humans.

The actual problem

It’s never been easier to launch a site.

It’s also never been easier to launch one agents can’t understand.

We have pieces:

• robots.txt
• schema.org
• OpenAPI
• llms.txt

But no unified “AI-ready” standard.

No Lighthouse for agents.

The idea:

Think Lighthouse, but for AI discoverability. Lighthouse is Google’s site audit tool — it scans your site and gives you performance + SEO scores.

It would:

• Audit how legible your site is to agents
• Standardize a clean “agent contract”
• Simulate what an LLM would extract
• Give you an Agent Readiness Score

Because soon:

Your customer might never visit your site.
Your pricing page might be summarized somewhere else.
Your product might be recommended by a model.

In that world, ranking doesn’t matter.

Being extractable does.

SEO shaped the last 20 years.

Agent readiness might shape the next 20.

Published on 2026-02-18