What is Agent Readiness?
Agent readiness is how prepared a website is for autonomous AI agents that need to discover what it can do, not just read what it says.
Published
Definition
Agent readiness is the degree to which a website exposes machine-readable descriptions of its capabilities, so autonomous AI agents can discover and use them without a human in the loop.
AI visibility asks whether a model can read and cite your content. Agent readiness asks something different: can an agent find out what your site can do, and then do it?
Why It Matters for AI Visibility
Crawlers read pages. Agents look for contracts. Before an agent interacts with a site, it checks a handful of well-known locations for structured declarations of endpoints, tools and permissions. A site that publishes none of them is not ranked badly in that layer — it is simply absent from it.
This is early, and most of the web has nothing. That is exactly why it is cheap to be visible now.
Example
hey-eye checks seven agent-readiness signals on every scan:
/.well-known/api-catalog API catalog (RFC 9727)
/.well-known/mcp.json MCP server card
/.well-known/agent-skills/ Agent Skills discovery index
/.well-known/webmcp.json WebMCP declaration
/auth.md Authentication notes for agents
Accept: text/markdown Markdown content negotiation
Link: HTTP headers Discovery hints on the homepage
Each one is a small static file. Together they turn a readable site into a usable one.
Related
- MCP · llms.txt
- Guide: hey-eye MCP Connector
- Tool: Agent Readiness in your dashboard