ChatGPT 
Perplexity 
Gemini 
Claude AI When did you last check if an AI agent could actually use your website? Not read it, use it. Book something, find your pricing, complete a transaction. If you haven't, there's a good chance it can't. Khan and I scratched the surface on this in the podcast, today we'll go deep into what AI discoverability actually means, why it matters for your business, and exactly how to make your website visible to AI agents.
What Does it Even Mean for a Website to be "AI Discoverable"?
It means a language model can find your website, read it, trust it, and use it accurately. You might ask why should developers and businesses care about this?
It's because we're entering an agent-first world, where agents powered by large language models don't just assist users in finding things, they go find things themselves. They compare your pricing page, read your docs, check your reviews, fill out your form, and come back with a recommendation. All of this, without a human ever touching your UI.
So this means that the audience for your website has split into two: humans and machines.
Until recently, design was entirely focused on the person clicking the button, scrolling the page, feeling the friction. That's still important. But there's a second audience now, machines!. There are AI agents, crawlers, retrieval systems, language models that are constantly reading your website. They're not clicking buttons or admiring your hero section. They're parsing structure, extracting meaning, assessing credibility, and deciding whether your content is usable or worth skipping entirely.
If your website isn't built with that second audience in mind, you're invisible to them. And invisible means losing revenue. To avoid this you must know exactly where your business' website falls short and what to fix, and that's the exact gap I intended to bridge when I built the skill agent-web-compatibility. It audits your website to check how AI-ready it is, how well an AI agent can pick up, understand, and complete transactions with your website, and gives actionable suggestions on how to improve.
SEO isn't Enough Anymore
SEO has been the go to for getting your website found, optimising your content, getting backlinks, and ranking higher. But here's the shift that's already happening: people are asking AI assistants instead of googling. And AI doesn't show you a ranked list of websites. It gives you one answer. If your content isn't structured for that world, you're invisible at the exact moment someone is ready to act. GEO and AEO are how you fix that.
What's the Difference between GEO and AEO?
These terms get thrown around interchangeably. They're not the same.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is about making your content legible, credible, and retrievable to large language models. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews generate an answer about your category, you want to be cited. You're not optimising for clicks, you're optimising for a model that reads semantically, values clarity and authority, and synthesises content into a single coherent answer.
GEO answers: Can AI find my content, understand it, trust it, and include it in a generated response?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) goes a level deeper. It's not just about being mentioned. It's about being used. As AI systems evolve from text generators into agents that take actions booking appointments, placing orders, querying availability your website needs to be something an AI can actually operate.
GEO gets you into the conversation. AEO gets you into the workflow. You need both.
What's actually broken on most websites
Here's what a typical business website looks like to an AI agent right now. No structured data the agent can't tell if you're a clinic, a restaurant, or a SaaS product without guessing. Hours of operation buried in an image completely unreadable. Booking flow behind a CAPTCHA or an OTP-only gate agents can't complete it. No named author on content is a hard trust disqualifier. Service list inside a PDF invisible to crawlers.
None of this is a problem for humans. You can see the image, solve the CAPTCHA, scroll to find the hours. But an agent hits each of these and either gives up or moves to a competitor who made it easy.
To check how AI discoverable your website is, install using the following command
npx skills add antstackio/skills --skill agent-web-compatibility
There are two ways to use it.
If you're a developer with access to the codebase, run the skill directly inside your project repo. It inspects your actual source code and gives you code-level recommendations not just what's missing, but exactly where to add it.
If you're a business owner or don't have access to the repo, just run it in your terminal and paste your website URL. It audits the live site and gives you the same actionable output.
The website will be audited across five layers:
- Discoverability — can the agent find and understand you?
- Preferability — does the agent trust you enough to recommend you?
- Completability — can the agent finish the transaction without breaking?
- Answerability — does your content surface as a direct answer?
- Citability — will AI systems actually cite or recommend your content?
Here's what the output looks like
Scorecard every item across all five layers marked ✅ Done / ⚠️ Partial / ❌ Missing. On schema markup, llms.txt file, form fields. Practically missing pieces that are invisible to any AI agent and gives priority fixes with top items ranked by impact, ready to paste JSON-LD block, llms.txt draft one file, ready to upload to the domain root. AEO content brief which question queries to target, what FAQ schema to add, and where the E-E-A-T signals are missing.
You hand this output to a developer and they know exactly what to build.
The honest bottom line
AI discoverability isn't a solved problem, the landscape is still shifting. But the fundamentals are clear: be readable, be credible, be structured, be accessible.
Most of this isn't new technology. It's the discipline to actually do it, consistently, across your whole site. The Agent Web Compatibility skill is open source. Install it, run an audit, and find out exactly where you stand.
