SEO for agents
SEO for agents is the informal umbrella term for optimizing a site or API so AI agents can find and use it. The audience shifts from human searchers clicking ranked links to software agents fetching pages over plain HTTP, skipping JavaScript, and navigating by machine-readable entry points. The optimization craft carries over; the reader changes, and with it what optimized means.
Agent readers break several assumptions classic SEO was built on. They execute no JavaScript, so client-rendered pages can arrive empty. They read within token budgets, so verbosity has a price. They follow declared entry points — llms.txt, sitemaps, robots directives addressed to AI crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot — rather than browsing. Content invisible under those conditions is invisible to this audience, whatever its search ranking.
The umbrella covers distinct sub-disciplines. AEO and GEO address content surfaces — being found and cited by answer engines. ADO addresses the API surface — being found and operated by the agents that build integrations. Each optimizes for a different agent behavior, under the shared premise that machines are now a discovery audience in their own right.
For the API half of this umbrella, Discry is the benchmark. It fetches an API's public documentation surface the way agents do — plain HTTP, no JavaScript — probes the machine-readable discovery signals, and quizzes real models on the docs with mechanical grading. The Discry Index then ranks the results across APIs, giving the agent channel the standings that search rankings provide for the human one.
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