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AI visibility & agent readiness
Prepare your website for the next generation of AI-driven customer journeys. SterlingWeb helps businesses improve how AI systems understand their services, evaluate their offerings and interact with their websites to complete supported tasks.
For Shopify and WooCommerce stores, B2B and manufacturing companies, service businesses, SaaS teams and agencies — in the US, UK, Europe, Australia and India.
1. Customer request
“Find a supplier with ISO 9001 and request a quote for 500 units.”
A person asks an AI assistant or agent
2. Your website
Specifications, certifications, policies, quote form
The agent reads facts and navigates your pages
3. Supported task
Quote request submitted — or handed back with the right page
Only where the platform and your site allow it
In short: Assistive Agent Optimization (AAO) is SterlingWeb's method for making a website easier for AI assistants and agents to read, evaluate and use: clear machine-readable facts, accessible interfaces and task flows that behave predictably.
The problem
An AI system can find your website and still fail to help a customer. It may misread what you sell, pick up an outdated price, or stall on a form it cannot label. These failures are often invisible in analytics: the visit never turns into a task, and nobody reports the error.
The agent cannot reach or render the information.
The agent reaches the page but misreads it.
The agent understands the page but cannot complete the task.
Definition
AAO is SterlingWeb's methodology for improving a website's readiness for AI-assisted discovery, evaluation and supported task completion. It covers the information an assistant needs (what you offer, for whom, at what price, under which policies) and the interface it has to use (links, forms, menus and checkout or booking steps).
AAO is not an industry standard with a governing body, and it does not change how any AI platform ranks or selects businesses. It is a practical way to remove the barriers we can test for — the same barriers that often affect people using assistive technology.
The four disciplines overlap: structured data, clean HTML and consistent facts help all of them. AAO adds interface testing and task-level measurement on top.
How AAO works
We look at the whole path an assistant takes through your site. Not every AI system supports every stage — many assistants stop at reading and summarising, and only some can navigate or submit forms.
Find and access the relevant pages and information.
Interpret services, products, policies and business details.
Compare the information and judge whether it fits the request.
Navigate the supported website workflows — filters, forms, carts.
Carry out a permitted task, where the platform supports it.
Record failures, success rates and opportunities for improvement.
Our AAO services
Each engagement is scoped from these six workstreams. Most projects start with the readiness audit; the rest are prioritised from its findings.
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Use cases
Examples of what we would test and fix. They describe typical scope, not client results.
Help AI systems interpret product details, prices, variants, stock information and supported purchase journeys — for example, an assistant comparing two Shopify products by size and delivery time.
Improve access to specifications, certifications, service details, supplier information and quotation workflows, so a buyer's assistant can confirm a tolerance or a certificate before requesting a quote.
Clarify services, locations, opening hours and appointment details, and make booking forms accessible. AAO never involves giving agents access to patient records or other sensitive data.
Make product capabilities, pricing tiers, integrations, documentation and demo-request flows easy to read and compare, so an evaluation assistant does not guess at plan limits.
Clarify expertise, services, service areas, qualifications and consultation booking, so an assistant can tell which office handles a request and how to book.
Delivery
Agree the tasks that matter commercially — quote requests, bookings, purchases — and the markets and assistants in scope.
Rendering, semantics, accessibility, structured data and business-fact consistency on priority pages.
Write task definitions and record baseline results with the agent, environment and date.
Fix the issues that block the most important tasks first, on your existing stack.
Re-run the same tasks under the same conditions and compare against the baseline.
Monthly re-tests, regression checks after site changes and a rolling backlog.
Deliverables
We do not publish a single “AAO score”. Reports show results per task and issues by severity, so every number can be traced to a test you can repeat.
Comparison
| Aspect | SEO | AEO | GEO | AAO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary objective | Be found and ranked in search results | Give direct, extractable answers to questions | Be represented accurately in AI-generated responses | Be understood and usable by AI assistants and agents |
| Typical problems addressed | Crawl and index issues, weak pages, slow templates | Answers buried in long copy, missing FAQs | Inconsistent brand facts, weak entity signals | Unlabelled controls, broken flows, conflicting product data |
| Core activities | Technical SEO, content, internal links | Question research, answer formatting, FAQ content | Entity data, primary-source content, citation monitoring | Semantic HTML, accessibility, structured data, task testing |
| Appropriate measurements | Indexation, rankings, organic traffic and conversions | Answer coverage, featured answers, AI Overview presence | Brand mentions, citation accuracy, share of voice | Task completion rate, failure categories, data accuracy |
| Relationship to the others | The foundation the others build on | Builds on SEO content | Builds on SEO and AEO | Complements all three; does not replace them |
Scroll the table sideways to see all four columns.
Measurement
We choose metrics for each engagement and report them separately. AI visibility metrics (mentions, citations) and agent usability metrics (task results) are never merged into one unexplained number.
Successful eligible task attempts ÷ Total eligible task attempts × 100
We do not promise rankings, citations, revenue increases or compatibility with every AI system. Results depend on the platforms, which change often.
Engagement options
AAO work is scoped to your site, stack and the tasks that matter to you, so we quote after a short discovery call rather than publish fixed prices.
Audit, task mapping and baseline results with a prioritised roadmap.
A fixed-scope sprint to fix the highest-priority issues and re-test.
Monthly task testing, regression checks and new improvements.
Catalogue data, integrations and multi-market flows for larger stores and B2B portals.
FAQ
Assistive Agent Optimization (AAO) is SterlingWeb's methodology for making a website easier for AI assistants and agents to understand and use. It covers machine-readable business and product facts, accessible interfaces, and task flows such as quote requests, bookings and checkout, measured with repeatable task tests.
SEO helps search engines find, index and rank your pages. AAO focuses on what happens after an AI system reaches the page: whether it can read your facts correctly and use your forms and flows. Many AAO fixes, such as clean HTML and structured data, also support SEO, but AAO adds interface and task testing.
AEO structures content so answer engines can extract direct answers. GEO works on how generative AI describes and cites your brand. AAO concentrates on interaction: whether an agent can navigate your site, use its controls and complete a supported task. The three overlap and work best together.
It can make a store easier for agents to use by improving product attributes, variant and price consistency, policy pages and the accessibility of cart and checkout steps. Whether a specific agent can browse or buy depends on that agent's capabilities and on the store's checkout and payment controls.
No. Most AAO work happens on the website itself: content, HTML, structured data and forms. An API or a supported agent integration can help for larger catalogues or B2B ordering, and we recommend one only when the use case justifies it.
Yes, where the agent supports form interaction and the site allows it. We make booking and quotation forms clearly labelled, keyboard-operable and predictable, then test them with defined tasks. We never bypass CAPTCHAs, logins, consent or payment controls.
No. llms.txt is an optional, experimental file that summarises a site for language models. It can be a useful documentation aid, but no major AI platform requires it, and adding it does not guarantee that agents will use your site.
No. No one can guarantee how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or other systems select or recommend businesses. AAO removes barriers we can test for and measures task results; selection decisions remain with each platform.
It depends on site size and scope. We agree the timeline after discovery: an audit is usually measured in weeks, implementation depends on the number and complexity of fixes, and monitoring runs monthly.
Mainly by task completion rate — successful eligible task attempts divided by total eligible attempts, times 100 — alongside failure categories, data accuracy and resolved critical issues. Each comparison records the agent, task, environment, sample size and test date.
Yes. We work on existing WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify sites without rebuilding them, and also on HubSpot, Webflow and headless Next.js sites.
Yes. Agencies can engage us for white-label audits, implementation and monitoring under their own brand, with deliverables prepared for their clients.
AAO readiness audit
Identify the technical, content and interaction barriers that may prevent AI systems from understanding your business or completing important website tasks.
Request an AAO Readiness Audit with the form, or:
Want a quick first look? The free AI Search Visibility Audit checks crawl access, structured data and answer readiness. It does not test agent task completion — that is part of the AAO Readiness Audit. Run the free AI Search Visibility Audit
