Search is changing, fast.
The next time someone asks about your brand, product, or service, they might not land on your website at all.
Instead, an AI agent could answer for you.
Whether it’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or a voice assistant, users are increasingly turning to AI to gather, summarize, and decide, without ever clicking a link. And those AI agents? They’re only as good as the information they can find and parse.
If your website isn’t built for them, you might be invisible.
Agentic AI: The New Front Door to the Internet
Agentic AI is a growing class of tools that act on behalf of users—not just offer suggestions.
These AI agents are beginning to:
- Summarize top products in a niche
- Cite reliable sources in long-form answers
- Book services or compare plans on command
They don’t navigate your homepage or click on carousels. They skim your structure, trust your schema, and move on.
UX Still Matters, Just Not the Way You Think
Most websites are optimized for people scrolling and skimming. But AI doesn’t scroll, it parses.
That’s where AX, Agent Experience, comes in. Just like UX focuses on how people navigate a site, AX considers how AI agents interpret, extract, and summarize your content. And as AI assistants become more common, designing for AX isn’t optional, it’s strategic.
If your site is cluttered with pop-ups, built with bloated frameworks, or filled with vague headings and disorganized content, it’s unlikely to get selected or cited by AI models. And that’s a missed opportunity.
Here’s what machines look for:
- Semantic HTML (headings, lists, tables, etc.)
- Logical page structure and hierarchy
- Fast load times
- Clear internal links
- Descriptive alt text and accessibility labels
- Structured data (like JSON-LD schema markup)
Consider this schema markup the team at Composite implemented for Obligo in Webflow:
Clean UX now doubles as clean input for AI, and improving AX ensures your content gets picked up, parsed accurately, and surfaced in AI-driven results.
Your Site Needs to Work for AI, Too
SEO isn’t just about pleasing Google anymore.
AI agents are scraping, citing, and summarizing directly from websites, often outside the bounds of traditional search engine indexing.
Want to future-proof your site for this shift? Start with:
- Descriptive headings that clarify your offerings
- Schema markup for services, products, and articles
- Accessible designs that support screen readers (and machine readers)
- Clear navigation, reduced bloat, and structured content
Pro tip: Add a llms.txt file to your site’s root directory. It’s an emerging standard that tells large language models (LLMs) how to crawl, cite, or ignore parts of your content (like paywalled content and internal pages).
Note that not all LLMs follow this yet, but more will adopt it over time.
AI-Ready Sites Look Different
An AI-optimized website isn’t just a brochure anymore. It’s a living data source. A reputation engine. A direct line to how people (and agents) interpret your brand.
That means UX, accessibility, and SEO are no longer separate silos, they’re overlapping requirements for a machine-readable future.
Curious how this is all evolving? The team at Composite broke it down further here, including examples of what’s working, and what’s getting ignored.