(This column originally appeared in Forbes)
Within five years, your website’s most important visitor won’t be a person. It’ll be an AI agent.
That was my biggest takeaway at MozCon, a conference from Moz, a software company that provides SEO and local search marketing tools, data, and educational resources to help businesses improve their visibility in search engines and attract more online traffic.
I attended MozCon a few years ago in Seattle and at that time the conversation was all about Google and how to stay ahead of its algorithms. This year, in New York, the tone had changed. The discussion wasn’t just about Google anymore. Instead, almost every conversation centered on something much bigger: how to prepare websites for AI agents.
The audience was mostly corporate content and SEO people from many well-known brands who are trying to figure things out. The speakers were experts from both Moz and the industry, like Mike King, the CEO of AI search and content marketing firm Ipullrank and Crystal Carter, who is head of AI search at the website building firm Wix.
One Word: Agents
The takeaway: every single website that exists now will need to change in the next few years. Some may need to be entirely re-designed from scratch. Yes, that means your company too. Why? One word: agents. SEO is becoming GEO — Generative Engine Optimization.
King gave the best example of this. It involves mayonnaise.
Imagine opening your refrigerator and discovering you’re almost out of mayonnaise. Before you even notice, your refrigerator has already launched an AI agent that compares prices, checks delivery times, places an order and schedules delivery. You are not involved. You won’t need to be. The technology exists now. It’s only a matter of time until it’s rolled out.
“It’s relevance engineering,” King said. “Every spec, price, review, policy and proof point will need to be available on websites to agents in formats they can ingest and cite.”
Why do you care? You care because if your website sells mayonnaise it will need to be re-designed so that it’s agent friendly. According to Carter of Wix that means updating it — or potentially re-doing it — to include protocols. An agent protocol is a shared set of rules and standards that allows AI agents to communicate with tools, data, and other agents. Instead of relying on custom “bespoke” integrations for every app, these protocols instead provide a common language so any compliant agent can easily discover and collaborate with other systems.
Today’s websites are built to persuade humans. Tomorrow’s websites will increasingly need to persuade software. AI agents don’t care about attractive graphics, animations or clever headlines. They care about structured information, trusted data, pricing, inventory, policies and machine-readable content.
Agent Protocols
According to Carter, some of the protocols you’ll need to consider for your website include:
MCP (Model Context Protocol) — This standard connects your website (and agents visit it) securely to external data, programming interfaces, applications, and tools without requiring custom integrations for each one.
ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) and UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) — These protocols enable AI agents to discover products, compare options, negotiate purchases, and complete transactions with merchants in a standardized way. UCP furthers allows shopping agents, merchants, and marketplaces to exchange product catalogs, shopping carts, checkout information, and orders across different platforms.
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) — This is a secure payment protocol that authorizes and verifies purchases made by AI agents, ensuring user consent, payment authentication, and accountability during transactions.
A2A (Agent-to-Agent Protocol) — An open standard that enables AI agents built by different companies and frameworks to communicate, delegate tasks, and collaborate with one another.
WebMCP — A website standard that lets AI agents interact directly with your website’s features and workflows behind the scenes instead of relying on screen scraping or manual browser automation.
NLWeb (Natural Language Web) — A framework that makes websites understandable to AI agents by exposing their content and services in natural language, allowing agents to discover and interact with them more effectively.
This is just a shortlist of protocols. Your website may need others, or not as many. But you’re going to need some of these. What happens if your website isn’t updated to include these protocols? Agents will bypass you. Which means you’re not going to sell mayonnaise. And if your business is reliant on selling mayonnaise that’s going to be a big problem for you. If your competitor is up to date, then they’re going to sell mayonnaise.
Of course, this example isn’t just for mayonnaise. It’s for any anything, any reason for why you will want visitors to come to your site. Even if you’re not selling products you — like most businesses — want your website to be visited by prospects and customers to get information, download documents, interact with customer service, register for events and take other actions.
Bots, Not Humans, Will Be Your Customer
Except that those customers and prospects will be bots not humans. According to Imperva’s latest Bad Bot Report, more than half of all Internet traffic is now generated by bots rather than humans. That number will exceed human activity shortly. Bots will be acting based on their human behaviors and demands. But it’s the bots that will be your customers, not humans.
Let’s also face this fact: you and I aren’t going to establish these protocols on our websites. We don’t have the expertise. My business is the same as yours. Like you, my website is important. Like you, it provides information about what we do. It also allows visitors to download whitepapers, order books, sign up for webinars and submit support questions. And like all websites, it’s been designed for humans.
Now I’m going to have to re-design it to accept agents. I may have to start from scratch. That’s a conversation I’ll be having shortly with my web developer. It’s a conversation you’ll need to be having too.
Businesses that wait until customers stop arriving may discover those customers never disappeared — they simply sent software instead. Businesses spent the past twenty years optimizing websites for Google. The next twenty years will be about optimizing them for AI.
“Don’t block the AI search bots,” King said. “Feed the machine — make it work for you.”
