Pillar Guide
The complete 2026 guide for local businesses and the people who build their sites. What agent-readiness actually means, the five things that decide it, why it's the accessibility work the industry has recommended for twenty years, and where to begin.
AI agents are software that acts on behalf of users. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's AI to "find me an HVAC company that can come today," the agent goes looking. It reads websites, parses information, and tries to complete tasks like checking availability or booking an appointment.
Agent-readiness is whether your site lets an agent do that. It's a measure of how readable and actionable your website is to software that doesn't see design — it sees structure.
The good news: this isn't new work. It's the accessibility and structured-data work the industry has recommended for twenty years. The only thing that changed is the business case.
We measure agent-readiness across five areas. Each represents a different way agents interact with your site.
When an agent reads your page, it doesn't see colors or fonts. It reads the accessibility tree — the same structure assistive technologies use. A button styled with CSS but built as a div is invisible. A link that's just a colored span doesn't exist.
Google published seven agent-friendly rules in 2024. All seven come down to: use real HTML elements. Real buttons, real links, real form fields.
Read the full guide on semantic HTML →
An agent trying to fill your contact form needs to know what each field is for. Without a label tied to each input, it's a wall of empty boxes. The for attribute, required fields, and proper input types aren't optional — they're what make a form usable.
Read the full guide on labeling forms →
JSON-LD structured data tells agents exactly what your business is: services, hours, location, ratings. Without it, agents have to guess from paragraphs. Headings and landmarks give the page shape an agent can navigate.
Read the full guide on structured data →
"Call for a quote" is a dead end for an agent. It can't make phone calls. Online scheduling, with a real booking flow an agent can complete, is what turns interest into action. Visible prices, not "request a quote," let an agent answer price questions.
Read the full guide on booking →
How do agents find you in the first place? llms.txt is an emerging standard that gives agents a clean map of your site. AI crawler rules in robots.txt control what they're allowed to read. WebMCP is the protocol coming next.
Read the full guide on agent discovery →
Run a scan. It takes seconds and shows you exactly where you stand. The score tells you how agent-ready you are, and the findings tell you what to fix, in order of impact.
Most local businesses score under 40. The technical fixes are often simple — a button that's a real button, a label on each form field, JSON-LD for your services. The businesses that handle these first will have a head start as agent traffic grows.
Scan your site free and get your agent-readiness score across all five categories.
Scan your site