OPTIMIZING WEBSITES FOR AI AGENTS

A GLOSSARY

Your website's next million visitors won't be human. This glossary covers the essential terminology for optimizing websites for AI agents, chatbots, and LLMs, a discipline known as Agent Experience Optimization (AXO).

CORE CONCEPTS

AXO(Agent Experience Optimization): The practice of optimizing websites for AI agent interactions. Just as UX focuses on human users and SEO focuses on search engine crawlers, AXO focuses on AI systems that browse websites on behalf of users, including shopping assistants, research agents, and AI chatbots. AXO ensures your site is discoverable by AI search, parseable by LLMs, and functional when AI agents attempt to complete tasks like filling forms or making purchases.

STRATEGY

GEO(Generative Engine Optimization): Optimizing content to appear in AI-generated responses and summaries. The term was coined by researchers studying how to rank in AI search results. GEO tactics include citing authoritative sources, using clear statistics, structuring content for easy extraction, and including quotable statements. Studies show GEO-optimized content can receive 30-40% more visibility in AI responses compared to unoptimized content.
AEO(Answer Engine Optimization): Optimizing content for direct answer systems like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, and Perplexity. AEO emphasizes factual accuracy, clear formatting, and structured data, the qualities that make content citable. The key distinction from GEO: AEO focuses on becoming the cited source, while GEO focuses on being included in synthesized answers.
Zero-Click Search: Search interactions where users receive answers directly in results without clicking through to websites. AI Overviews and chatbot integrations have accelerated this trend dramatically. Some studies suggest 60% or more of searches now result in zero clicks. For businesses, this shifts success metrics from traffic volume to brand mentions and citation frequency in AI responses.
AI Overviews: Google's AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results, synthesizing information from multiple sources to answer queries directly. Launched in 2024, AI Overviews now appear on roughly 30% of US searches. For website owners, the challenge is being cited as a source rather than having your traffic replaced by the summary.

TECHNICAL

llms.txt(AI Agent Guidelines File): A proposed standard file (placed at /llms.txt) that provides AI agents with guidelines for navigating and understanding a website. Think of it as robots.txt for LLMs: while robots.txt tells crawlers what to index, llms.txt tells AI systems how to interpret your content, what's important, and how to cite you. The standard was proposed in 2024 and is gaining adoption among AI-forward companies. See llmstxt.org for the specification.
AI Crawlers: Automated systems that fetch and analyze web content on behalf of AI platforms. The major crawlers are GPTBot (OpenAI/ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Anthropic/Claude), and PerplexityBot (Perplexity). Unlike Google's crawler, most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, meaning they only see raw HTML. AI crawler traffic grew over 300% in 2025, with GPTBot alone generating 569 million monthly requests on major infrastructure like Vercel.
Structured Data: Machine-readable metadata embedded in web pages using JSON-LD format and Schema.org vocabulary. While humans read your content, AI systems rely heavily on structured data to understand context: what type of content this is, who created it, when it was published, and how it relates to other information. Proper structured data significantly increases the chance of being cited by AI systems and appearing in AI-generated responses.
Server-Side Rendering(SSR): Generating complete HTML on the server before sending it to browsers. Critical for AXO because AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. A React or Vue app that renders content client-side appears completely blank to GPTBot and ClaudeBot. Sites must serve pre-rendered HTML for AI visibility.
Bot Management: Systems that identify, classify, and control automated traffic to websites. Many bot management solutions, including Cloudflare's default settings as of mid-2025, block AI crawlers by default, accidentally making websites invisible to AI search. Proper AXO requires explicitly allowing beneficial AI bots while blocking malicious ones.

LEARN TO OPTIMIZE FOR AI AGENTS

Subscribe to get weekly insights on making your website work for AI agents and LLMs.

Subscribe Now