botworthy Scan my site
Guide

Make your site work for agents

People now send AI agents to compare prices, book and buy for them. We sent one to 198 well-known websites. These are the things that stopped it most often, and what to do about each.

1. Decide whether agents can get in at all

This is the big one. 91 of 198 sites turned our agent away, 88 of them on the first page load. That's rarely a decision anyone made about agents. It's usually bot protection doing what it was set up to do: blocking automated browsers and traffic from cloud servers. Personal agents are both.

What to do: look at your bot management or firewall settings and decide on purpose. Blocking scrapers and attacks doesn't have to mean blocking a customer's assistant. Many providers can tell bots that identify themselves apart from ones that hide, and can treat known, verified agents differently. If you do block, return a clear message, not a page that never loads, so an agent can tell its user to come to you directly.

2. Let the agent through checkout

Starting a checkout was the hardest task. 14 sites let the agent browse and then blocked it at checkout, and on 11 more it couldn't reach the first checkout step. Agents stop before payment; they need to get far enough to show their user the total, the delivery options and the next step.

What to do: make "Add to cart" and "Checkout" real buttons with clear names, let people check out as a guest, and keep extra bot checks for the payment step itself, not the cart.

3. Give every control a name

Agents, like screen readers, mostly read the page's accessibility tree, not its pixels. On 38 of the 107 sites, our agent met buttons or links with no usable name and had to guess from a screenshot. Some names were broken in odd ways: on apple.com some link names contained raw HTML, on awaytravel.com the contact options were named <p>LIVE CHAT</p>, and on avis.com links started with image file names.

What to do: use real <button> and <a> elements, give icon-only controls an aria-label (a cart icon becomes aria-label="Cart"), and check your names with a screen reader or your browser's accessibility panel. Everything you fix here helps people using assistive tech too.

4. Make the cookie banner easy to answer

42 of the 107 sites showed a cookie banner first. Our agent always declines, which worked when there was a clearly named reject button and cost it extra steps when declining meant opening settings.

What to do: put "Reject all" next to "Accept all", as a real button with that name, and don't hide the page's content behind the banner.

5. Keep pop-ups out of the way

26 sites put a pop-up in front of the agent: newsletter offers, discounts, region pickers.

What to do: delay or drop pop-ups on first visit, and give every one a close button named "Close".

6. Don't hide prices, contact details and policies behind a login

24 sites asked the agent to log in partway through a task. Agents won't log in on their own, so anything behind a login is invisible to them: often a price, a plan comparison or how to reach a person. Finding a human was the task most often only partly done.

What to do: keep prices, a contact page with a phone number or email, and your return or cancellation policy public, and link them from the footer.

7. Fix what's broken

The most common problem of all: on 53 of the 107 sites, at least one link, button or page simply didn't work when the agent used it.

What to do: test your main paths (find a product, search, add to cart, contact, returns) with keyboard only. If you can't get through without a mouse, an agent probably can't either.

Check your own site

Look up your site on the leaderboard, where every result has a replay of each task, or ask us to scan it. Results and the steps that worked are also open to agents themselves: see Botworthy for agents.