From ranking to recommended: get your site ready to thrive in the age of AI agents

Cloudflare argues that businesses increasingly need to optimize for AI agents and assistants that discover, evaluate, and recommend products or services before customers visit a website. Its Agent Readiness dashboard feature evaluates whether a site is accessible and understandable to agents by checking elements such as robots.txt, sitemaps, machine-readable Markdown, metadata, APIs, authentication, and emerging agent protocols, then provides evidence, improvement guidance, and Cloudflare setup links. The new Answer Engine Optimization tool measures how often leading AI assistants such as Claude and GPT mention or cite a business in relevant category queries, reporting metrics including citation rate, prominence, mention rate, share of voice, and industry fit relative to competitors. Cloudflare builds category-level benchmarks from repeated model queries and combines them with site-specific operator activity data, including crawling, referrals, and errors, to help owners assess agent traffic and test improvements. The company positions these tools as a way for businesses to treat AI agents as an important new audience and increase their likelihood of being found, understood, trusted, and recommended.

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