We wrote earlier about checking whether AI recommends your business. That was about customers asking an assistant who to consider, getting a few names, and looking for themselves.
The next step has arrived: customers not asking, but delegating. “Find three companies that build garden fences and get a quote from each.” “Book a table for four, Saturday, six thirty.” The AI opens websites itself, reads pages, fills in forms, and reports back.
The visitor on your site in that moment is not a person. It is a program running someone’s errand. These visits are still rare today — but they are worth thinking about now, because the preparation is cheap and none of it can be wasted.
How a machine visitor differs from a person
It does not look at your hero image, does not pick up your brand’s tone, cannot be won over. It arrives with a specific task and hunts the page for facts: what you do, what it costs, where you are, when you’re open, how to get in touch.
If it finds them, it takes them. If not, it moves to the next site. It has less patience than a human visitor, and more fairness — it acts purely on information, indifferent to your ad spend and your design budget.
The usual ways the errand fails
Prices published as an image, or buried in a PDF. To a human eye there is no difference; to a machine there is. Some can read these — expensively and unreliably. Most of the time it simply gives up.
“Contact us for details.” Its task was three quotes. The companies with figures on the page make the shortlist; you contributed zero information, so you are not on it. This is not a new problem — the logic in why we publish our prices simply counts double with a machine visitor.
Opening hours that only live on Facebook or Instagram. Platform content is mostly a closed door to machines. You think you published it; effectively you did not.
Forms defended by aggressive CAPTCHAs. The test that blocks bots also blocks the one running a real customer’s errand. That is a genuine trade-off — among the anti-spam approaches, the ones invisible to legitimate visits, like honeypots, just gained another argument. At minimum, keep a phone number and email visible in plain text as the fallback when the form cannot be filled.
Key information behind clicks, accordions and pop-ups. Content hidden behind interaction is often unreachable for machines — and, honestly, unread by humans in a hurry too.
What to prepare: one list
The good news is that nothing on it is a new invention:
Prices and scope, in text, on the page. What you do, what you don’t, roughly what it costs. The highest-return line on this list.
Structured data. Hours, address, services, price range, stated again in a format machines recognise. This piece explains what it actually affects, in non-technical terms.
Name, address, phone — identical everywhere. Website, Google Business Profile, social accounts, one consistent story. While they disagree, a machine cannot confirm these are the same company, and the safe move is to leave you out.
Policies as web pages, not only PDFs. Refunds, deposits, cancellation terms — exactly the things an AI must verify before committing on someone’s behalf.
Decide whether machines get in at all. These agent visits are not the same thing as AI training crawlers and deserve a separate decision; the trade-offs are in should you block AI crawlers.
A site built for machines happens to be built for people in a hurry
Notice that nothing on the list asks you to sacrifice the human experience for AI. Clear facts, published prices, consistent information, nothing important hidden behind interaction — a human visitor in a hurry wants exactly the same things.
So there is no wrong bet available here. If machine visitors never amount to much, every item still pays for itself.
A realistic judgement
Honestly: in New Zealand, AI actually placing orders and spending money is still rare. AI collecting quotes, shortlisting companies and checking opening hours is already happening — and that is precisely the step that decides whether you make the shortlist.
You do not need to buy any “agentic optimisation” service for this. The list above is the whole job, and it happens to be the same foundation SEO and GEO stand on. However fast this field moves, none of it is wasted.
When we build a website, this list is the default, not an add-on. If you already have a site, the audit in our SEO and GEO service walks through every line of it.