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Agents Do Not Need Your Website to Be Pretty. They Need It to Be Decidable.

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— Originally published at dev.to

The web is getting a new reader. It is not only a customer, a search crawler, or a casual visitor. It is an AI assistant trying to decide whether a business is worth surfacing, summarizing, comparing, or acting on.

OpenAI's ChatGPT agent announcement makes the shift clear: agents are moving from research into guided web action. Google's I/O 2026 Search update points in the same direction, with AI Search becoming more agentic and multimodal. Google also showed AI Mode in Chrome working beside the webpage itself, which means the page is no longer just a destination. It is context for an assistant.

Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl work adds another piece: content owners are starting to decide how automated systems can access and use their sites. Axios' Cannes coverage framed the larger tension around bots, clicks, and the open internet economy.

For founder-led businesses, the takeaway is practical. Your website needs to be decidable.

A decidable website answers these questions fast:

  • Who is this for?
  • What problem does the business actually solve?
  • What proof exists?
  • What should a serious buyer do next?
  • What should an assistant summarize without inventing anything?

Most small business sites still behave like brochures. They look polished, then leave the important logic scattered across hero copy, social posts, testimonials, offers, and half-finished case studies. Humans can sometimes piece that together. Agents will compress it, misread it, or ignore it.

That does not mean every founder needs a giant content operation. It means the core business layer has to be clearer: offer, proof, audience, constraints, next step, and trust signals.

This is where Reidify's work is pointed. The website is treated as an operating surface for the business, not just a visual identity wrapper. If you want to see the founder behind that approach, start here: Rish Sadh at Reidify.

The new website question is not "does it look modern?" It is "can a person or agent understand the business well enough to take the right next step?"

That is the standard worth building for now.

5 Comments

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This is a really interesting take. A site can look great and still be a pain for agents to actually use. Curious do you think this will change how developers approach UI/UX long term?

0 votes
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@[Itay] Thanks. Short answer: I do not think it changes UI/UX much, and I think that is the point.

The two audiences fail on the same things for different reasons. A person skimming a pricing page and an agent parsing it both get stuck on unlabelled controls, state that only exists inside an animation, and copy that implies rather than states. Fixing those for machines makes the page better for people, so I would not treat it as a separate discipline.

What I do expect to change is what counts as optional. Semantics, real headings, explicit states, and text that says the thing rather than gesturing at it have been nice-to-haves on a lot of teams. When an agent cannot finish a task without them, they stop being nice-to-haves.

What I would not expect is "agent-first design" as a trend. Most of the work is the accessibility and information architecture that was already worth doing.

1
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I like “decidable” as the framing, especially from the GEO/AEO side of this. I think there's another layer hiding inside your question, “What proof exists?”: can the agent evaluate the provenance of that proof?

A site can make its audience, offer, claims, testimonials, case studies, and next steps beautifully machine-readable while still leaving an agent unable to distinguish independent evidence from self-assertion. Ten highly decidable websites repeating the same originating claim don't create ten independent sources.

I think that's where GEO/AEO eventually has to mature beyond making answers easy for agents to retrieve and summarize. The evidence around those answers needs to become machine-legible too: who made the claim, what source supports it, when it was valid, whether the source is authoritative, and whether apparent corroboration actually shares the same origin.

Otherwise we can create websites that are increasingly easy for agents to understand without making them any better at deciding what deserves belief. Machine-readable isn't necessarily machine-trustworthy.

1 vote
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@[Ken W. Alger] Agreed, and I think you have named the harder half. Decidable was about whether an agent can act. You are asking whether it should, which is a different question and a worse one.

The shared-origin problem is the part I find most under-discussed. Syndication makes it concrete: one article republished across five platforms looks like five sources unless something in the markup says otherwise. The canonical tag is one of the few machine-legible signals that actually says "this is a copy, not corroboration", and it exists for duplicate-content reasons rather than epistemic ones. It does the right job almost by accident.

The pieces for the rest mostly exist and are barely used. ClaimReview is scoped to fact-checkers. sameAs, citation, author and dateModified carry fragments of it. Nothing standard says "this claim originated here, and these are downstream repeats of it".

Where I have landed practically is unglamorous: publish the method and the denominator next to the number, including the runs that did not flatter us, and date it. That does not make a claim authoritative. It makes it checkable, which is the most a self-published source can honestly offer. An agent that cannot verify me can at least see exactly what was measured and go and disagree with it.

So yes, machine-readable is not machine-trustworthy. I would add that the trust layer probably cannot be self-asserted at all, which is why the interesting work is provenance rather than more schema on your own domain.

1
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@[reidify] Yes, I think that last distinction is the key one. A publisher can make a claim more inspectable, but it can't make the claim independently trustworthy merely by adding more metadata asserting its trustworthiness.

Your canonical example is especially interesting because it shows that we already have some of the machinery, but not necessarily the epistemic model. rel="canonical" can tell a machine that five pages descend from one publication event, but mostly because search engines needed a duplicate-content mechanism. From a provenance perspective, that same relationship prevents five copies from masquerading as five independent evidence chains.

I also like “checkable” as the practical target for self-published material. Publishing the method, denominator, date, negative results, and underlying evidence doesn't establish authority by itself. It gives an external observer something against which the claim can be evaluated. That's a much stronger property than simply asking the observer to trust the publisher's characterization of its own evidence.

I suspect the missing layer isn't just another way of saying “trust me.” It's a way to preserve the distinction between what the source asserts about itself, what evidence it exposes, what relationships connect it to other sources, and what an independent observer can actually corroborate.

That seems especially important for GEO/AEO because otherwise, optimizing for machine readability could inadvertently make unsupported claims easier to consume without clarifying their evidentiary status.

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