Seriously, why help an industry that we all know doesn't care and will still scrap your site regardless? The least they can do it put in some minimal effort without expecting everyone to bend over for them.
I'd rather have a site showing how well my site is protected from being accessed by AI agents would be preferable, and advises how I can lock it down further. Basically, the exact opposite of this.
Maybe we can start a new protocol where the html is encrypted, and the viewer must try 2^10 to 2^20 hashes before the decryption key is discovered. Same formula that BTC mining uses. It would be negligible cost for any single user but terribly expensive for crawling en-masse.
Anything that increases the entry time by a second or more is a pretty good way to make me (and probably others) just not bother with opening the website.
Usually the Anubis anti-bot things only take a second. But I stared at one for more than 30 seconds the other day when I tried to access one of the Linux kernel websites. Literally just a progress bar with a hash counter. I was on a modern iPhone, I don’t know why it took so long. maybe because my phone had low battery? But it’s infuriating that this is what the web has become.
The web is becoming more and more unusable every day. If your data is easy to access, it gets stolen and scraped, your site effectively DDOSed. If your site is hard to access nobody will visit.
The absurd process of SEO hucksters trying to pivot their obsolete services into "GEO" as most ecommerce websites realize their entire value was a list of part numbers and prices.
"GEO" (optimizing for agent search) is the legitimate sequel to SEO though.
I published a free macOS app three years ago to the app store and abandoned it. Over the last six months I received multiple emails per week from people asking where they can find it since it only shows up on the app store for older macOS.
I finally asked people how they found out about my app, and 100% of the time it was because they asked ChatGPT how to do something and it found my crappy website.
I had also written aspirational but nonexistent features on my website at the time (like a personal TODO), and ChatGPT told people my app had this feature they wanted.
So I took the time to put a 2.0 release together years later.
There's clearly a lot of power here, like how you can make claims on your website that LLM agents take at face value. It's like keyword stuffing all over again since LLMs are not hardened against it.
For ecommerce it's even more obvious. I asked an LLM why it thought Product A was better than Product B and it clearly just regurgitated a paragraph from Product A's website about how it's better than Product B. We've all probably hit this with Google Search's AI summary where it's regurgitating some nonsense someone wrote in a blog post or reddit comment.
"Generative Engine Optimization" a phrase as dumb as the idea.
For 30 years marketers have been doing everything they can to avoid making sites useful for people, despite that being what Google rewarded from the start (e.g. relevant link text, page titles, and headings).
It’s infuriating when I do a search and get an entire page of AI slop articles, “helpfully” prefixed with the search engines’ own AI summary of the AI slop articles
I searched for a specific niche product the other day. Second result down was AI blogspam “what to buy now that product X has been discontinued. We reviewed these 9 alternatives now that the company shut down.”
The company didn’t shut down. The 9 alternatives were the same product by the same company in different sizes and quantity counts. How kind of them to hallucinate so many glowing reviews for me after they hallucinated a problem into existence first.
At least the search engine can summarize all the slop for me. It even cites sources! The sources directly contradict the summary almost every time, but why would you click through?
It's probably quicker and more cost effective to just buy advertisements on ChatGPT. Let OpenAI deal with the technical problem of "how can we make AI able to use a website designed for humans".
Come on, cant you tell? LLMs will crawl your website over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and OVER AGAIN!
Businesses are generally in the business of serving human customers, not AI agents. Furthermore, if AI agents are so smart, surely they can figure it out for themselves.
As a user, why would I trust an AI agent that cannot consistently use non-AI-tailored websites? If it cannot even do that, who knows what other failure modes it may hit me with.
I don't want my site to be agent ready. I'd prefer people visit my site so that I can make revenue than have an AI scrape my content and answer the question for someone else.
I've redesigned my site to have enough content so that AI knows what I have but they have to send the user to my site to use an interactive JavaScript widget to get the final answer they need. So far so good, but not sure how long that will work for.
So far I haven't seen crawlers or agents utilize the interactive map widget where the final useful data is located. I'm sure it will happen eventually.
I can tell they're not using it because the page is getting hit by their user agents but my API is not.
If I have to use "interactive map widget" and you weren't the only supplier of the lifesaving thing I'd noped out of there faster than I arrived (and then blacklisted you in kagi to never come back again).
That depends. I used "AIs" to help me quickly sift though many accommodation, travel and entertainment options for my upcoming holiday (4 people, 2 weeks).
If the "AI" I was talking with couldn't see your offer, it naturally didn't exist for me in the assessment and choice phase I then did.
So I don't think it's universally a "no". Like it or not, LLMs are useful.
so use this and then do the opposite of what it suggests if you want to have a cheap, low-effort way to prevent AI from being able to use your content effectively
No metric for performance, obviously. That would ruin the entire narrative.
How much CPU time an average request takes is probably the most important factor in the real world. No one running a frontier AI lab is going to honor any of the metadata described here.
Ironically, this feels exactly like the various "semantic web" initiatives, only this time coming directly from the tech megacorps and not the starry-eyed "free web"/"open data" idealists.
It will hit exactly the same walls too, namely that the technical details are completely irrelevant - if adopting a standard is actually a negative for websites, because it will separate the site from its users, sites will obviously not do it.
You can lead the horse to water but you cannot make it drink, especially if the water is obvious poison.
> if adopting a standard is actually a negative for websites, because it will separate the site from its users, sites will obviously not do it.
Not that I believe this will be how the future turns out, but what if the main users of websites end up being agents? Then adopting the standard ends up being a requirement for survival instead of something negative.
Hopefully and ideally we don't end up there, because then the internet will surely suck for us humans, but I'm not so sure the whole "make platforms/websites open up for the machines" will necessarily fail yet again because of the same issues, can very well be different this time.
Is an agent-ready website so obvious poison? If I'm running a plumber shop in East London, then I'd want agents to know that just as much as I want Google (Search) to know that. The same will be true for most real-world businesses. Only sites that make money by selling their users' data and eyeballs obviously stand to suffer.
Or the website of someone who makes things for people to see, or art for people to consume, and would prefer to avoid being automatically plagiarized as much as possible. It's not always about business.
The TDMRep protocol [1] is supposed to tell scrappers used for text and data mining whether a ressource can be mined or not. Naively, I would say that a website which explicitly express not wanting to be included in training data would also be considered not wanting to be pulled by agents. I know it's not the same thing, but it still itches me a bit.
I think this is worth typing a random website into or your website to see it’s analysis.
I’m not really interested in my website being ai ready, but it’s particularly fascinating to me that they are suggesting and interface for ai agents to make payments to secure access to an api.
Generally, when I want to pay for an api, it would be really wonderful to be able to just direct an ai to setup the account and get me some credentials.
It's a shame that Cloudflare rolled out a bunch of neat product announcements under the confusing, noisy umbrella of "Agent Week". Off the top of my head, Artifacts, Email, Mesh (tailscale competitor), all buried.
It's bound to happen sooner or later for every company out there it seems. None of them can keep themselves to "Do one thing and do it well", probably because that means growth eventually stops, and VCs really don't like that, so off in all directions and no direction at the same time we go, and it ends up like that. It's a shame to see the contrast from how CF and others used to be, felt they cared about quality back then.
I have reduced my online presence to much less than it once was partly because I don't want to feed this machine training data that I've worked hard to make for a human audience.
Like it or not I think "agents browsing the web" is the inevitable near-term future. Some agents will be malicious, many will not. In 2036, HN posters will be complaining about how such-and-such site only works with closed proprietary AI agents, and how their creaky old Mac M5 running Gemma 3 under Ollama can't browse the site properly because it doesn't follow the 2029 RFC XYZ for agent compatibility that nobody ever fully implemented.
Sure, lets say I eat up all of that and agree with you: How does this website help/not help? Agents already read HTML perfectly fine, saying "Well, you don't serve markdown so this obviously is bad for agents, you're only serving HTML" doesn't really feel like it's contributing anything either in protecting against malicious agents, or how the website only work for some agents but not others.
I'm going to try to figure out how to make my websites as easy as possible to peruse for humans while making it as hard as possible to do the same for agents. There should be some way make the bots pay a price of admission while keeping it free for people.
This still doesn't really answer my question, though. This is like telling me my old blog posts can't be parsed by your regex.
Like... yeah, no shit; I didn't build it for your regex. It's not the target audience.
Plus, isn't the appeal of LLMs broadly that they can do somewhat-useful things with mostly-arbitrary input (if you ignore the risk of prompt injection)?
You might be joking, but frankly, I wouldn't mind.
Though this is undermined somewhat by stories like this one[0], where an AI runs a "slow life" store catering to a lifestyle that specifically tries to disconnect from technology.
Around 2010 I met a friend at a bar in San Francisco and within 10 minutes we were approached by someone with a chocolate bar startup. It may have been vaguely associated with developers or maybe I'm misremembering. We got a free sample and I explained I didn't live in the US and I also wasn't an investor. They left and moved on to the next group of people at the bar.
This has always stuck to me as an example of the pinnacle of collective investment delusion that seems to exist in certain circles. They idea that you can shape the world to your product instead of improving the world with your product. You just have to try hard enough.
I get a few points for having a robots.txt with rules specific to AI-crawlers, even though those rules are complete bans. Shame, I was hoping to get a 0.
My traffic is down 60% year on year because of AI overviews and LLMs. They took everything without consent, used it without credit, and pushed my retirement back a few years. Now I should make their job easier?
I think this is meant for "web apps", not "websites" ("sites"). I tried emsh.cat (a blog) and got 25, it complains about missing an "API catalogue", OAuth/OIDC and a bunch of more completely irrelevant stuff. Also tried HN which is very easy for any agent worth their salt to both parse and browse, can hardly get better for an agent, and it gets a score of 17.
Seems like this belongs squarely in the fun and ever-growing collection of "Cloudflare throws vibe-slop into the world and see what sticks".
"Agent-ready" for me would mean they are all being locked out, given the boot, shown the middle finger, and ideally sent into an endless fractal maze never to return.
I feel pretty uncomfortable by this being a Cloudflare product. Cloudflare is the one that I'm expecting to keep bots out of my site with their AI bot blocking feature. Feels like I'm letting the fox guard my henhouse.
Cloudflare has always operated this way. For example, they give DDoS protection to DDoS for hire services. This increases the supply of these services because it means they can't shut down their competitors by DDoSing each other, which in turn encourages more regular people to use Cloudflare so they won't get their sites DDoSed.
You are missing the section on “x402, UCP, and ACP”: monetization. If the end goal is to get a cut of your paid agent traffic, they have a strong incentive to block free access from automated sources.
This seems like nonsense at any angle? Like, if the agent hype comes true, then agents will be just as good at using any website as humans are, and there's no need to make any changes to your site. And if the hype doesn't come true, then who cares if your site is agent ready.
Unless of course you want to expose some functionality only to AIs, not humans. Then sure. But why would you want to do that?
Yeah, plus it's a bit... single minded. A static single page site is _quite_ "agent ready". Scores 0 here. It's not like it'll need an MCP or whatever.
Or it's a psyop to see which IP owns which website. Datamining this at scale, you come across isitagentready.com, chances are, you're going to plug in your own website(s) into it, so now cloudflare has a mapping of IP to website owner. If you used your home wifi, glue that info to your google/meta ad profile, and then Cloudflare also knows what's up.
it's https://reloadium.com
tho I was wrong I do registerTool() not provideContext() because the W3C specs shows it's registerTool()
webmachinelearning.github.io/webmcp/
> What’s the F is going on? Is the world gone mad or something?
Yes, it's madness but it doesn't matter that it's mad because you can't stop it. It's a technological gold rush, with all of the mixed connotations that "gold rush" should imply.
Although it's not the world proper, but a very loud and well-paid cohort of shills, astroturfers and spin doctors. Plus the occasional useful idiot and me-too hitchhikers, no doubt.
Also AI industry: "Please make sure your website is adapted so that AI agents are able to use it."
The web is becoming more and more unusable every day. If your data is easy to access, it gets stolen and scraped, your site effectively DDOSed. If your site is hard to access nobody will visit.
The latency while browsing the web these days is brutal as a result; between Anubis and Cloudflare and the like.
Our prize for it will be the impending super intelligence our benevolent future overlords allow us to exploit, I suppose. /s
I published a free macOS app three years ago to the app store and abandoned it. Over the last six months I received multiple emails per week from people asking where they can find it since it only shows up on the app store for older macOS.
I finally asked people how they found out about my app, and 100% of the time it was because they asked ChatGPT how to do something and it found my crappy website.
I had also written aspirational but nonexistent features on my website at the time (like a personal TODO), and ChatGPT told people my app had this feature they wanted.
So I took the time to put a 2.0 release together years later.
There's clearly a lot of power here, like how you can make claims on your website that LLM agents take at face value. It's like keyword stuffing all over again since LLMs are not hardened against it.
For ecommerce it's even more obvious. I asked an LLM why it thought Product A was better than Product B and it clearly just regurgitated a paragraph from Product A's website about how it's better than Product B. We've all probably hit this with Google Search's AI summary where it's regurgitating some nonsense someone wrote in a blog post or reddit comment.
* You describe your website as "crappy" yet ChatGPT was able to figure it out enough to get you traffic for an app you didn't maintain
* ... with the caveat that it thought made up theoretical features were actual features
So unless your website was "GEO"d by sheer accident, I really don't think this is a good example to cite as the demonstration of what you're saying.
For 30 years marketers have been doing everything they can to avoid making sites useful for people, despite that being what Google rewarded from the start (e.g. relevant link text, page titles, and headings).
I searched for a specific niche product the other day. Second result down was AI blogspam “what to buy now that product X has been discontinued. We reviewed these 9 alternatives now that the company shut down.”
The company didn’t shut down. The 9 alternatives were the same product by the same company in different sizes and quantity counts. How kind of them to hallucinate so many glowing reviews for me after they hallucinated a problem into existence first.
At least the search engine can summarize all the slop for me. It even cites sources! The sources directly contradict the summary almost every time, but why would you click through?
403 Forbidden
error code: 1106
The site is blocking our scanner. This may be due to WAF rules, bot detection, or IP-based restrictions.
Perfect :)
> isitagentready.com returned 522 <none>
Ironic perfection.
Why do you have a website in the first place?
I've redesigned my site to have enough content so that AI knows what I have but they have to send the user to my site to use an interactive JavaScript widget to get the final answer they need. So far so good, but not sure how long that will work for.
I can tell they're not using it because the page is getting hit by their user agents but my API is not.
Your site, your choices.
But also: hostile design? My choice.
So:
- are you certain this "revenue" doesn't come from ads promoting scams? or you simply don't care?
- what do you think about LLMs "licensing" the content so you get royalties instead of putting these artificial obstacles?
which LLMs are doing this?
(Hint: no)
If the "AI" I was talking with couldn't see your offer, it naturally didn't exist for me in the assessment and choice phase I then did.
So I don't think it's universally a "no". Like it or not, LLMs are useful.
How much CPU time an average request takes is probably the most important factor in the real world. No one running a frontier AI lab is going to honor any of the metadata described here.
We couldn't scan this site isitagentready.com returned 522 <none>
The site appears to be experiencing server errors. This is not an agent-readiness issue. Try scanning again later.
It will hit exactly the same walls too, namely that the technical details are completely irrelevant - if adopting a standard is actually a negative for websites, because it will separate the site from its users, sites will obviously not do it.
You can lead the horse to water but you cannot make it drink, especially if the water is obvious poison.
Not that I believe this will be how the future turns out, but what if the main users of websites end up being agents? Then adopting the standard ends up being a requirement for survival instead of something negative.
Hopefully and ideally we don't end up there, because then the internet will surely suck for us humans, but I'm not so sure the whole "make platforms/websites open up for the machines" will necessarily fail yet again because of the same issues, can very well be different this time.
[1] https://www.w3.org/community/reports/tdmrep/CG-FINAL-tdmrep-...
I’m not really interested in my website being ai ready, but it’s particularly fascinating to me that they are suggesting and interface for ai agents to make payments to secure access to an api.
Generally, when I want to pay for an api, it would be really wonderful to be able to just direct an ai to setup the account and get me some credentials.
Good.
The announcement is so full of AI shit that I'm not even going to consider it as a competitor.
I have reduced my online presence to much less than it once was partly because I don't want to feed this machine training data that I've worked hard to make for a human audience.
Like... yeah, no shit; I didn't build it for your regex. It's not the target audience.
Plus, isn't the appeal of LLMs broadly that they can do somewhat-useful things with mostly-arbitrary input (if you ignore the risk of prompt injection)?
Though this is undermined somewhat by stories like this one[0], where an AI runs a "slow life" store catering to a lifestyle that specifically tries to disconnect from technology.
It's incredibly perverse.
"Now, make sure your websites are rigorously structured in such a way that allows the technology to work..."
This has always stuck to me as an example of the pinnacle of collective investment delusion that seems to exist in certain circles. They idea that you can shape the world to your product instead of improving the world with your product. You just have to try hard enough.
[1]: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Seems like this belongs squarely in the fun and ever-growing collection of "Cloudflare throws vibe-slop into the world and see what sticks".
Unless of course you want to expose some functionality only to AIs, not humans. Then sure. But why would you want to do that?
https://isitagentready.com/cloudflare.com
Fix: Implement the WebMCP API by calling navigator.modelContext.provideContext()
but I already do that. the extension detects them https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/webmcp-model-contex...
What’s the F is going on? Is the world gone mad or something?
Yes, it's madness but it doesn't matter that it's mad because you can't stop it. It's a technological gold rush, with all of the mixed connotations that "gold rush" should imply.
We are, after all, talking about some metadata here you are more than welcome to leave off your site.
What’s the F is going on? Is the world gone mad or something?
This, too, will pass. Like Blackberries and car bras.Short answer: Yes.
Although it's not the world proper, but a very loud and well-paid cohort of shills, astroturfers and spin doctors. Plus the occasional useful idiot and me-too hitchhikers, no doubt.