What we learned making our site ready for AI agents
AI assistants are starting to do the reading, comparing and even the buying for people. So we used our own website as the test bed: we gave it everything the isitagentready.com scanner checks for, then built demo agents to see what actually happens when an AI comes to buy from us.
The site went from Level 1 (“basic web presence”) to Level 5 (“agent-native”), the scanner's top level, without a new website. Everything is a layer on top of the Umbraco site and Stripe account we already had. Here's what we'd tell a business owner after doing it.
1. Most of the value today is in being readable, and it's cheap
An assistant answering “what does 63Digital do?” has to read our pages. A normal web page is mostly menus, scripts and styling. We now serve every page as plain text (Markdown) when an assistant asks for it, and the difference is large: across seven of our main pages, 295 KB of web page became 41 KB of text, 86% smaller, with the same content.
Less to read means less to misread and less cost for the AI tool doing the reading. Add a short summary of the site in a standard place, and a small service that lets assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT search our pages directly, and assistants answer from our words rather than guessing from search snippets. This was the cheapest part of the whole project, and the part we'd recommend to almost everyone.
2. Check you haven't blocked AI without deciding to
Our first step was simply telling AI tools, in the site's robots file, that they're welcome to search, quote and learn from the site. That one change moved us up a level. Many sites block AI assistants without the owner ever choosing to: a security service default, a plugin setting, a line copied from somewhere. Our own bot protection turned away our test scripts until we sent them like a normal browser. Whether you want AI to use your content is a business decision. Make it on purpose.
3. Paying works, but the standards haven't settled
We sell one thing to AI agents: a £3 coffee for the team. It can now be bought five different ways, because there are five competing open standards for an agent to pay (MPP, ACP, UCP, AP2 and x402). Our demo agent has completed purchases on the live site with several of them, all through Stripe test payments.
Two honest findings. First, few everyday assistants can actually spend money for you yet, and in the UK some routes, such as paying in digital dollars, aren't open to businesses at all. Second, no single standard has won. Our conclusion: don't bet on a winner. Keep your payments with a provider that is adding agent checkout (Stripe and Shopify both are), so supporting the winning standard later is a small job rather than a rebuild. We cover the detail in how to let AI agents pay your business with Stripe.
4. Trust is most of the work
Getting an agent to pay took far less effort than making it safe. Agents retry when a connection drops, so every order carries a reference that stops a second charge. Before an assistant can send us an enquiry, the person behind it confirms their email address. Error messages reveal nothing about our accounts. Our own AI agent has a hard monthly spending cap. And every request our agents send is signed with a published key, so other sites can tell a genuine agent from a scraper.
None of that is visible in a demo, and all of it is what separates a showcase from something you'd let near your customers.
5. Most businesses don't need their own AI agent yet
We built two agents of our own that talk to each other, and a shopper you can watch buying from us. They're useful for showing what's coming, and we learned a lot. But for most businesses they'd be cost without return today. The order we'd suggest is:
- Now: let AI in on purpose, make your pages easy to read, and keep prices, services and contact details accurate. Assistants repeat what they find.
- If you sell online: check your payment or shop platform's plans for agent checkout, and try a simple product in test mode.
- Later: your own agent, once customers are actually arriving through AI assistants.
See it for yourself
You can watch a demo agent shop with test money, see two agents work together, and connect your own assistant to our site in Try our AI agents. No coding needed. If you'd like to know how ready your own site is for AI assistants, and which of these steps are worth it for your business, get in touch.