I'd rather have a site showing how well my site is protected from being accessed by AI agents would be preferable, and advises how I can lock it down further. Basically, the exact opposite of this.
Come on, cant you tell? LLMs will crawl your website over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and OVER AGAIN!
I don't want my site to be agent ready. I'd prefer people visit my site so that I can make revenue than have an AI scrape my content and answer the question for someone else.
I've redesigned my site to have enough content so that AI knows what I have but they have to send the user to my site to use an interactive JavaScript widget to get the final answer they need. So far so good, but not sure how long that will work for.
No metric for performance, obviously. That would ruin the entire narrative.
How much CPU time an average request takes is probably the most important factor in the real world. No one running a frontier AI lab is going to honor any of the metadata described here.
Ironically, this feels exactly like the various "semantic web" initiatives, only this time coming directly from the tech megacorps and not the starry-eyed "free web"/"open data" idealists.
It will hit exactly the same walls too, namely that the technical details are completely irrelevant - if adopting a standard is actually a negative for websites, because it will separate the site from its users, sites will obviously not do it.
You can lead the horse to water but you cannot make it drink, especially if the water is obvious poison.
> if adopting a standard is actually a negative for websites, because it will separate the site from its users, sites will obviously not do it.
Not that I believe this will be how the future turns out, but what if the main users of websites end up being agents? Then adopting the standard ends up being a requirement for survival instead of something negative.
Hopefully and ideally we don't end up there, because then the internet will surely suck for us humans, but I'm not so sure the whole "make platforms/websites open up for the machines" will necessarily fail yet again because of the same issues, can very well be different this time.
Is an agent-ready website so obvious poison? If I'm running a plumber shop in East London, then I'd want agents to know that just as much as I want Google (Search) to know that. The same will be true for most real-world businesses. Only sites that make money by selling their users' data and eyeballs obviously stand to suffer.
Or the website of someone who makes things for people to see, or art for people to consume, and would prefer to avoid being automatically plagiarized as much as possible. It's not always about business.
The TDMRep protocol [1] is supposed to tell scrappers used for text and data mining whether a ressource can be mined or not. Naively, I would say that a website which explicitly express not wanting to be included in training data would also be considered not wanting to be pulled by agents. I know it's not the same thing, but it still itches me a bit.
I think this is worth typing a random website into or your website to see it’s analysis.
I’m not really interested in my website being ai ready, but it’s particularly fascinating to me that they are suggesting and interface for ai agents to make payments to secure access to an api.
Generally, when I want to pay for an api, it would be really wonderful to be able to just direct an ai to setup the account and get me some credentials.
It's a shame that Cloudflare rolled out a bunch of neat product announcements under the confusing, noisy umbrella of "Agent Week". Off the top of my head, Artifacts, Email, Mesh (tailscale competitor), all buried.
It's bound to happen sooner or later for every company out there it seems. None of them can keep themselves to "Do one thing and do it well", probably because that means growth eventually stops, and VCs really don't like that, so off in all directions and no direction at the same time we go, and it ends up like that. It's a shame to see the contrast from how CF and others used to be, felt they cared about quality back then.
Or it's a psyop to see which IP owns which website. Datamining this at scale, you come across isitagentready.com, chances are, you're going to plug in your own website(s) into it, so now cloudflare has a mapping of IP to website owner. If you used your home wifi, glue that info to your google/meta ad profile, and then Cloudflare also knows what's up.
I have reduced my online presence to much less than it once was partly because I don't want to feed this machine training data that I've worked hard to make for a human audience.
Like it or not I think "agents browsing the web" is the inevitable near-term future. Some agents will be malicious, many will not. In 2036, HN posters will be complaining about how such-and-such site only works with closed proprietary AI agents, and how their creaky old Mac M5 running Gemma 3 under Ollama can't browse the site properly because it doesn't follow the 2029 RFC XYZ for agent compatibility that nobody ever fully implemented.
Sure, lets say I eat up all of that and agree with you: How does this website help/not help? Agents already read HTML perfectly fine, saying "Well, you don't serve markdown so this obviously is bad for agents, you're only serving HTML" doesn't really feel like it's contributing anything either in protecting against malicious agents, or how the website only work for some agents but not others.
I'm going to try to figure out how to make my websites as easy as possible to peruse for humans while making it as hard as possible to do the same for agents. There should be some way make the bots pay a price of admission while keeping it free for people.
This still doesn't really answer my question, though. This is like telling me my old blog posts can't be parsed by your regex.
Like... yeah, no shit; I didn't build it for your regex. It's not the target audience.
Plus, isn't the appeal of LLMs broadly that they can do somewhat-useful things with mostly-arbitrary input (if you ignore the risk of prompt injection)?
Around 2010 I met a friend at a bar in San Francisco and within 10 minutes we were approached by someone with a chocolate bar startup. It may have been vaguely associated with developers or maybe I'm misremembering. We got a free sample and I explained I didn't live in the US and I also wasn't an investor. They left and moved on to the next group of people at the bar.
This has always stuck to me as an example of the pinnacle of collective investment delusion that seems to exist in certain circles. They idea that you can shape the world to your product instead of improving the world with your product. You just have to try hard enough.
I get a few points for having a robots.txt with rules specific to AI-crawlers, even though those rules are complete bans. Shame, I was hoping to get a 0.
My traffic is down 60% year on year because of AI overviews and LLMs. They took everything without consent, used it without credit, and pushed my retirement back a few years. Now I should make their job easier?
I think this is meant for "web apps", not "websites" ("sites"). I tried emsh.cat (a blog) and got 25, it complains about missing an "API catalogue", OAuth/OIDC and a bunch of more completely irrelevant stuff. Also tried HN which is very easy for any agent worth their salt to both parse and browse, can hardly get better for an agent, and it gets a score of 17.
Seems like this belongs squarely in the fun and ever-growing collection of "Cloudflare throws vibe-slop into the world and see what sticks".
"Agent-ready" for me would mean they are all being locked out, given the boot, shown the middle finger, and ideally sent into an endless fractal maze never to return.
I feel pretty uncomfortable by this being a Cloudflare product. Cloudflare is the one that I'm expecting to keep bots out of my site with their AI bot blocking feature. Feels like I'm letting the fox guard my henhouse.
Cloudflare has always operated this way. For example, they give DDoS protection to DDoS for hire services. This increases the supply of these services because it means they can't shut down their competitors by DDoSing each other, which in turn encourages more regular people to use Cloudflare so they won't get their sites DDoSed.
You are missing the section on “x402, UCP, and ACP”: monetization. If the end goal is to get a cut of your paid agent traffic, they have a strong incentive to block free access from automated sources.
This seems like nonsense at any angle? Like, if the agent hype comes true, then agents will be just as good at using any website as humans are, and there's no need to make any changes to your site. And if the hype doesn't come true, then who cares if your site is agent ready.
Unless of course you want to expose some functionality only to AIs, not humans. Then sure. But why would you want to do that?
Yeah, plus it's a bit... single minded. A static single page site is _quite_ "agent ready". Scores 0 here. It's not like it'll need an MCP or whatever.
> What’s the F is going on? Is the world gone mad or something?
Yes, it's madness but it doesn't matter that it's mad because you can't stop it. It's a technological gold rush, with all of the mixed connotations that "gold rush" should imply.
Although it's not the world proper, but a very loud and well-paid cohort of shills, astroturfers and spin doctors. Plus the occasional useful idiot and me-too hitchhikers, no doubt.
403 Forbidden
error code: 1106
The site is blocking our scanner. This may be due to WAF rules, bot detection, or IP-based restrictions.
Perfect :)
I've redesigned my site to have enough content so that AI knows what I have but they have to send the user to my site to use an interactive JavaScript widget to get the final answer they need. So far so good, but not sure how long that will work for.
(Hint: no)
We couldn't scan this site isitagentready.com returned 522 <none>
The site appears to be experiencing server errors. This is not an agent-readiness issue. Try scanning again later.
How much CPU time an average request takes is probably the most important factor in the real world. No one running a frontier AI lab is going to honor any of the metadata described here.
It will hit exactly the same walls too, namely that the technical details are completely irrelevant - if adopting a standard is actually a negative for websites, because it will separate the site from its users, sites will obviously not do it.
You can lead the horse to water but you cannot make it drink, especially if the water is obvious poison.
Not that I believe this will be how the future turns out, but what if the main users of websites end up being agents? Then adopting the standard ends up being a requirement for survival instead of something negative.
Hopefully and ideally we don't end up there, because then the internet will surely suck for us humans, but I'm not so sure the whole "make platforms/websites open up for the machines" will necessarily fail yet again because of the same issues, can very well be different this time.
[1] https://www.w3.org/community/reports/tdmrep/CG-FINAL-tdmrep-...
I’m not really interested in my website being ai ready, but it’s particularly fascinating to me that they are suggesting and interface for ai agents to make payments to secure access to an api.
Generally, when I want to pay for an api, it would be really wonderful to be able to just direct an ai to setup the account and get me some credentials.
I have reduced my online presence to much less than it once was partly because I don't want to feed this machine training data that I've worked hard to make for a human audience.
Like... yeah, no shit; I didn't build it for your regex. It's not the target audience.
Plus, isn't the appeal of LLMs broadly that they can do somewhat-useful things with mostly-arbitrary input (if you ignore the risk of prompt injection)?
Good.
This has always stuck to me as an example of the pinnacle of collective investment delusion that seems to exist in certain circles. They idea that you can shape the world to your product instead of improving the world with your product. You just have to try hard enough.
"Now, make sure your websites are rigorously structured in such a way that allows the technology to work..."
[1]: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
Seems like this belongs squarely in the fun and ever-growing collection of "Cloudflare throws vibe-slop into the world and see what sticks".
https://isitagentready.com/cloudflare.com
Fix: Implement the WebMCP API by calling navigator.modelContext.provideContext()
but I already do that. the extension detects them https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/webmcp-model-contex...
Unless of course you want to expose some functionality only to AIs, not humans. Then sure. But why would you want to do that?
What’s the F is going on? Is the world gone mad or something?
Yes, it's madness but it doesn't matter that it's mad because you can't stop it. It's a technological gold rush, with all of the mixed connotations that "gold rush" should imply.
We are, after all, talking about some metadata here you are more than welcome to leave off your site.
What’s the F is going on? Is the world gone mad or something?
This, too, will pass. Like Blackberries and car bras.Short answer: Yes.
Although it's not the world proper, but a very loud and well-paid cohort of shills, astroturfers and spin doctors. Plus the occasional useful idiot and me-too hitchhikers, no doubt.