For over 20 years Dave has worked with brands to make their websites accessible to search engines’ crawlers and bots. Now he is leading the way we helping companies ensure their web platforms, through the front end website and back end, are accessible to AI Agents (to access content and take actions on users’ behalf).
Standards for how AI Agents can access, and importantly how they prefer to access, information through the internet are not the same as how search engine crawlers and renderers used for traditional search engines like Google and Bing work.
Even Google and Bing’s own AI Tools don’t crawl sites like their search engines do. For a start AI Agents often don’t render web pages so Javascript and Client Side Rendering that worked fine for Google search may leave your content invisible to Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and others.
Where AI Agents access web pages we need to make it as easy as possible for them to access information in a machine friendly manner including:
- Lightweight code
- Extensive use of Structured Data and Schema (beyond what Google Search supports)
- Aria and role labels to signpost primary content, use of page elements and more.
- Inclusion of text, headings, tags and structured data in the HTML (Source Code) file for each page
AI Tools are now starting to agree to standards that will allow them to access endpoints from the backend of web platforms like databases and APIs to not only pull content but also interact with companies’ web offerings including filling forms, booking appointments and making purchases. Model Context Protocol or MCP is a key standard for allowing this to happen but what is available is also important and some platforms are easier to setup through MCP for AI access than others.
Machine/AI Accessibility Audit
Dave the SEO & Co’s Machine Accessibility Audit is the first such audit offered in the industry and includes checks of over 100 front and back end requirements and best practice and recommendations for improving Machine Accessibility to MAWS (Machine Accessibility Web Standards).
Dave can also support on Migration projects to ensure that sites are futureproofed for an AI Agent dominated future.
Machine/AI Accessibility Audit Prices start at £2,000. For a proposal detailing what is included in the Standard and Extended options fill out the form bellow or Book an Intro Call with Dave