Agent readiness
Agents are the newest machine reader, and the most demanding. They need Meaning to pick you, Authority to recommend you, Presence to find you, and Signals good enough to complete a transaction without a human in the loop. Most of the work sits in Enable, but the audit comes first.
Assistants, shopping agents and browser agents are starting to find, compare, configure, book and buy on behalf of your customers, and you do not know whether they can complete the task on your properties.
Signals, after a Meaning check. If the agent describes you wrongly, no amount of API work helps. If it describes you correctly and cannot act, start here.
Define. Prove. Distribute. Enable.
- The priority agent journeys per ICP: find, compare, configure, book, buy, support.
- The facts an agent needs at each step: price, availability, eligibility, policies, locations, hours.
- Which agents and assistants matter for the audience; identify each by its documented identity.
- Reviews, ratings and outcomes an agent weighs when it recommends, kept current and genuine.
- Specifications, benchmarks and comparison criteria published so an agent can compare fairly.
- Presence in the marketplaces, directories and feeds agents consult, with the same facts everywhere.
- Partner and platform integrations where the audience's assistant actually operates.
- Test every priority journey as an agent would; log where forms, flows, logins and data fail.
- Actionable data current and machine-readable; one source of truth to every feed and endpoint.
- Permissions set deliberately for user-triggered fetchers versus crawlers; documented endpoints only where a consumer exists.
- Transaction, booking and support flows that complete without human intervention where that is the intent.
Use a baseline, not a vibe.
Agent task-completion success per journey; feed accuracy and latency; surface coverage from the source of truth; agent-attributed inquiries, bookings and sales measured separately from web referrals.
Building endpoints and files for consumers that do not exist yet is cost without evidence. Fix the journeys real agents already attempt first.
Run the audit first.
The playbook assumes you know the constraint. The 24-statement audit takes ten minutes and tells you which pillar and which reader to start with.