Why “How do we make our website AI-friendly?” is not the correct question

So much information about agentic readiness of websites over the last few days, especially after Google announced Lighthouse checks and OKF. Most marketing people I am speaking to these days are asking: “How do we make our website AI-friendly?”

While this is definitely a legitimate question, the better question might be: “Can an AI agent actually understand and use the knowledge of our website?” Because this is exactly what matters for business when prospects are doing top of funnel discovery.

One concept I found particularly interesting in this regard is building a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer on top of a certain website’s own content. I have seen this being done for this blog. The idea behind this endpoint is that instead of forcing agents to search through dozens of blog posts the website becomes a knowledge source by itself, answering questions using its own published content and LLM capability. What an excellent idea to expose content in an agent-friendly form eliminating an additional step, just like conversion rate optimisation for humans!

Usecases are endless.In healthtech, an agent on behalf of a licensed practitioner might ask about relevant regulation, tech application methods or implementation considerations from the vendor’s knowledge base. In IT security I can imagine extensive product documentation sections being used to answer compatibility or architectural design questions.

This is less searching, faster answers and more confidence in the output quality for users (if built and tested properly). This helps buyers evaluate solutions more efficiently while keeping responses very well grounded in the company’s expertise.

A website that lets AI agents understand, connect and explain those articles is far more valuable. That’s what agentic readiness is really about.

Andrei Iunisov is an independent lead generation and SEO expert with 20 years of worldwide experience. Since 2006 Andrei has been involved in digital marketing for the rapidly growing software company Parallels in the USA. In 2009 he co-founded one of the first Google-certified web analytics agencies in CIS. His client list included many well-known technology companies in the region. In 2014 the business was sold to the hugest independent digital marketing group in Russia - iConText Group. Since 2016 Andrei has provided individual digital marketing services to various technology companies worldwide. His deep industry expertise allows to start generating leads immediately with a predicted cost-per-lead without time-consuming experiments and rapidly increases the SEO traffic with minimum budgets.