Someone opens Claude and asks it to recommend a product designer in London. It reads a few websites, picks the ones it can understand, and returns 3 names. Your name could be missing from that list. And your Google ranking is completely separate from why.
What AEO means and why it matters right now
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. SEO is about ranking in search engines. AEO covers a different problem: making your website readable and usable by AI tools that answer questions directly, without a search engine in the middle.
SEO puts your shop on a street where Google sends foot traffic. AEO makes sure people can read your sign, open the door, and understand what you sell once they get there.
AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf are already being used to research products, find services, and make recommendations. They do this by reading websites directly. According to Cloudflare, 96% of the top 200,000 websites have never addressed this. Most sites have no idea it is happening.
What Google’s official 2026 guidance actually says
Google published official guidance this week on appearing in their generative AI search features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Traditional SEO still works.
Their AI features run on retrieval-augmented generation, which means AI responses are grounded in content pulled from Google’s existing search index. Whatever already helps you rank in regular search also helps you show up in Google’s AI results.
They were specific about llms.txt files too. The guidance confirms you can skip creating them for Google Search. No special AI markup needed. If you have been hearing about llms.txt everywhere and wondering whether Google requires it, your existing SEO already covers you there.
Two types of AI are reading your website right now
Google’s AI features pull from their index. Traditional SEO feeds that index. For AI Overviews and AI Mode, your existing strategy handles it.
Direct AI agents work differently. Claude, Cursor, Windsurf. They browse the live web like a person would, except faster and with far less patience for unclear structure. They land on your site, read what they can access, and make decisions based on what is there. Give them nothing useful and they carry on to the next result.
AEO is the work that prepares your site for that second type of visitor. Google’s guidance covers the first. Both require different things. And most people are only aware of one of them.
How to audit your AI readiness for free
A tool called isitagentready.com runs 7 checks on any website in about 30 seconds. It tells you whether direct AI agents can correctly access, read, and understand your content.
The checks cover whether you have an llms.txt file describing your site to AI tools, whether your robots.txt permissions are set correctly for AI agents, and whether your content structure is clear enough to parse.
My score on 02ui.com: 33 out of 100. That number told me exactly where to start.
Go to isitagentready.com, type in your URL, and read what comes back. Free, specific, and the results will probably surprise you.
What a low score means and the fixes that move it
A low score means AI agents are landing on your site and getting very little useful information back. That has a real cost now, and it grows as more people use AI tools to find and compare things online.
The fixes are straightforward enough to do in an afternoon.
An llms.txt file. A plain text file that lives at yourwebsite.com/llms.txt. It tells AI tools who you are, what your site covers, and how you want them to use your content. Write it once, in plain English. About 20 minutes.
Robots.txt permissions. Most sites have a robots.txt file already, written for Google. Adding the right permissions for AI agents takes a few lines and about 5 minutes.
Clear content structure. AI agents read semantic HTML the same way screen readers do. Descriptive headings, logical page hierarchy, clear links. These habits make the site better for human visitors too, so the work pays twice.
Why designers and founders should do this now
The AI agent economy is still early. Most websites have a long way to go, and that is a window.
If you have a portfolio, a product, a studio site, or anything online you want people to find and trust, the time to address this is before it becomes standard practice. SEO took years to become the default. AEO is at the very beginning of that same curve.
I documented every fix I made to 02ui.com, including the actual files and the before-and-after score, at 02ui.com/aeo. Everything is there so you can run the same process on your own site.
Start with the free audit. The score will tell you what to do next.
Make Your Site Agentic Ready in an Afternoon
5 steps. Do them in order. The audit at the start tells you what to fix. The audit at the end tells you whether you fixed it.
- Run the free audit at isitagentready.com. Type in your URL and read the results. Your score tells you exactly where to start.
- Create an llms.txt file. A plain text file that lives at yoursite.com/llms.txt. Write who you are, what your site covers, and what you want AI tools to do with your content. Plain English. About 20 minutes.
- Update your robots.txt. Add the right permissions for AI agents. A few lines of plain text alongside your existing rules.
- Check your page structure. Clear headings, descriptive links, logical hierarchy. Each page should make sense to a first-time reader who has no other context about you.
- Re-run the audit. See what moved. Repeat on anything still flagged.
The full process, including the actual files I used will be on our YouTube Channel.
