What is Agent SEO? A plain-English guide

A definition you can use

Agent SEO is search engine optimisation for a reader that is not a person. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot "who is a good accountant for a small design studio?", the assistant searches, reads a handful of pages, and writes one answer. Agent SEO is everything you do to be one of the pages it reads, and one of the names it gives.

I use "agent" on purpose. Today most of this is assistants answering questions. More and more it is agents doing jobs: comparing suppliers, filling a basket, booking a table. An agent that cannot work out your prices or opening hours will pick someone whose website makes that easy.

You will see the same idea under other names: AI SEO, generative engine optimisation (GEO), answer engine optimisation (AEO), LLM SEO. They overlap almost completely. I have written a separate guide to the jargon so this one can stay short.

How an assistant decides who to mention

Nobody outside the AI companies knows the full recipe, and it changes. But the broad steps are public, and each one is a place where a website can fall over.

1. It searches. The assistant turns the question into one or more searches. Google describes its AI features doing this as "query fan-out": several related searches at once. ChatGPT's search uses third-party search providers, and OpenAI names Bing as one.
2. It fetches pages. It reads the most promising results, using its own crawler or a live fetch on the user's behalf.
3. It picks out passages. It lifts the parts that answer the question. Microsoft describes Copilot breaking pages into "smaller, structured pieces" for this.
4. It writes the answer and cites sources. Your name appears, or it does not.

So there are three questions to ask of any website. Can the assistant reach it? Can it tell what the business is? Is there anything there worth quoting?

Found, understood, recommended

Found

The assistant's crawlers have to be allowed in, and your pages have to be in the search indexes it leans on. This is where a surprising number of sites fail without knowing.

• A robots.txt that blocks AI crawlers, sometimes added by a plugin or a hosting company.
• A security service that challenges or blocks automated visitors. Cloudflare, for example, announced in July 2025 that new customers would have AI crawlers blocked by default. On two of my own domains I found it adding rules to robots.txt that told GPTBot and ClaudeBot to stay out. I had not asked for that.
• Content that only appears after JavaScript runs. A 2024 study by Vercel and MERJ found that none of the major AI crawlers it tracked rendered JavaScript.
• Pages missing from Bing. Plenty of site owners have never looked.

More on this in AI crawlers and robots.txt and Bing, IndexNow and ChatGPT search.

Understood

A person can glance at your home page and work out what you do. A machine needs it spelled out.

• Say what you sell, who for, where, and for how much, in ordinary text. Not in an image, a PDF or a tab that needs clicking.
• Add structured data (JSON-LD) that states the same facts in a format built for machines. See schema markup for AI search.
• Keep the facts identical everywhere: your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, directories, app stores. When sources disagree, the assistant has to guess.

Recommended

This is the part you earn. Assistants quote pages that answer the question asked, and they lean on what other websites say about you.

• Answer real customer questions on your site, in the words customers use.
• Publish honest comparisons. When my Mac app Cartage was recommended in tests, a page comparing it fairly with alternatives was one of the pages cited.
• Be present, accurately, on the review sites and directories that get cited for your kind of business.

How Agent SEO differs from ordinary SEO

They are not rivals. Google is blunt about this in its own guidance: optimising for its AI features "is still SEO", and there are "no additional requirements" to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Assistants lean on search indexes, so a site with poor SEO has poor Agent SEO too. Agent SEO is the extra layer: the crawlers, the machine-readable facts, and the checking.

What Agent SEO is not

• Not a trick. There is no hidden tag that makes ChatGPT recommend you. Anyone selling one is selling hope.
• Not llms.txt. That file gets a lot of attention and, on current evidence, very little use. The detail is here.
• Not guaranteed. Assistants choose their own sources, and the same question can get different answers an hour apart.
• Not a replacement for being good. If your competitors have better products and happier customers, the web will say so, and so will the assistants.

Where to start

If you want to do this yourself, do it in this order. It is the order I used on my own sites.

1. Check access. Read your robots.txt. Look at what your CDN or security plugin is doing. How to check.
2. Check the indexes. Search site:yourdomain.com in Bing and Google. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools.
3. State your facts. Plain text first, then structured data.
4. Ask the assistants. Type in the questions your customers would ask. Note who gets named and which sites are cited.
5. Fill the gaps. Write the pages that answer the questions you are missing from.
6. Measure again in a few weeks. Crawlers need time to come back.

Or start with the free instant checker, which does step 1 and part of step 3 in a few seconds.

Frequently asked questions

Is Agent SEO the same as AI SEO?

In practice, yes. Agent SEO, AI SEO, generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation all describe improving how AI systems find and cite a website. "Agent SEO" puts the emphasis on AI agents that act for people as well as answer them.

Do I need Agent SEO if my normal SEO is good?

Good SEO is most of the foundation, so you are ahead. But it does not cover everything. A site can rank well in Google while blocking OpenAI's crawlers, missing from Bing, or carrying no machine-readable facts. Those are quick to check.

How long does Agent SEO take to work?

The technical fixes take days. The effect on answers takes longer, because crawlers must revisit your site and indexes must update. On my own sites I allowed two to three weeks before measuring again. Earning mentions on other websites takes months.

Can I do Agent SEO myself?

Yes. Most of it is careful housekeeping, and the articles on this site explain each part. What takes time is knowing what to look for and checking it properly, which is the part people pay me for.

Sources

• Google Search Central, AI features and your website and Optimizing your website for generative AI features. Checked 10 November 2026.
• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers and Publishers and developers FAQ. Checked 10 November 2026.
• Microsoft Advertising, Optimizing your content for inclusion in AI search answers, 8 October 2025.
• Vercel and MERJ, The rise of the AI crawler, 17 December 2024. Crawler behaviour may have changed since.
• Search Engine Land, Cloudflare to block AI crawlers by default, July 2025.
• My own tests on 11 websites, 10 November 2026: the case study.