Agentic readiness
How well a website or business can be found, read, trusted and bought from by AI agents acting for a user. Not the same as an organisation's AI-adoption maturity.
Glossary: AEO, GEO, agentic readiness and MCP
Plain-English definitions of AEO, GEO, agentic readiness, agentic commerce, MCP and llms.txt for NZ business.
Definitions
Agent-ready website
A website whose pages, policies and actions can be understood and used by AI agents without a human: crawlable, clearly structured, trustworthy and, where relevant, able to complete a purchase or enquiry.
Agentic commerce
Buying and selling where an AI agent researches, compares or completes a purchase on a person's behalf, using protocols and structured data rather than a human clicking through a storefront.
Agent experience (AX)
The quality of a site or service from an AI agent's point of view: how easily it can discover, parse, authenticate with and act on it. AX is to agents what UX is to people.
AEO (answer engine optimisation)
Making content easy for search and AI systems to extract as a direct answer, using clear questions, concise answers and structured data. The first layer of agentic readiness.
GEO (generative engine optimisation)
Improving the chance that generative AI systems cite or recommend a brand in their answers. It overlaps with AEO and depends on SEO foundations.
SEO
Improving a site's visibility in conventional search results. Its crawlability and content foundations underpin AEO, GEO and agentic readiness.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
An open protocol that lets AI assistants connect to tools and data sources through a standard interface. A business can expose an MCP server so assistants can query it directly.
Remote MCP server
An MCP server hosted at a URL (for example over streamable HTTP) that assistants connect to, usually with OAuth sign-in. AIready's is nz.aiready/mcp.
llms.txt
A plain-text file at /llms.txt that gives language models a short, curated map of a site. Helpful but not required; no major engine has committed to relying on it.
WebMCP
A browser-side proposal that lets a web page expose actions and tools to in-browser AI agents, so an agent can use a checkout or form without scraping.
Content Signals
A robots.txt extension where a site states whether its content may be used for search, AI input and AI training.
Structured data (JSON-LD)
Machine-readable markup, usually schema.org, that states what a page is (a business, product, offer or article) so systems don't have to guess.
AIready score
A 0–100 score from five checks (Bot Access, Discoverability, Content, Commerce, API & Security) grouped into four layers: Find, Read, Trust, Buy. Levels: under 40 Invisible, 40–59 Hard to Find, 60–79 Needs Work, 80+ Recommended.
NZ Agentic Readiness Index
AIready's planned quarterly measurement of how agent-ready New Zealand business websites are, published as open data.