Ask your web team

The ten decisions, each with its sentence

Which AI bots and agents to let in

Please export the current AI bot settings from our CDN or bot protection and tell us, for each of Search, Agent and Training traffic, whether it is allowed, challenged or blocked, and on which pages. See the decision.

Whether to charge AI crawlers and agents

Please set up a paid-access test on one named section, report AI crawler and agent requests by operator every month, and tell us which operators stopped fetching during the test. See the decision.

Whether prices and policies are readable as text

Please list which page templates show price, availability, delivery and cancellation terms as text in the first HTML response, and which show them only after scripts run, in an image or in a PDF. See the decision.

Whether an agent may complete a purchase

Please list every agentic sales channel enabled in our store platform admin and the date each was switched on, and tell us how our fraud rules score an order that an agent started. See the decision.

Whether to publish an API or an MCP server

Please tell us which of our main tasks can be done through a documented API today, and what it would take to offer an MCP server for the one task we choose. See the decision.

Whether to accept agent payments

Please ask our payment provider which agent payment routes it supports today, which shopping surfaces each one serves and what it would take for us to switch them on. See the decision.

How to tell verified agents from unknown bots

Please tell us whether our CDN or bot protection checks verified bot signatures (Web Bot Auth) or a verified bot list, and whether we treat verified agents differently from unknown automation. See the decision.

What to tell legal

Please confirm our returns, cancellation, privacy and terms pages load as text without JavaScript or a login, and are linked from every product or booking page. See the decision.

What to measure

Please send a monthly report of AI crawler and agent requests by operator from our CDN logs, and re-run one public scanner on the pages of our main task. See the decision.

What to budget

Please estimate in days the work to fix pages that need JavaScript to show their text and to review our bot protection rules, before we choose any tool. See the decision.

Find

Can agents find you? Whether AI crawlers and assistants are allowed in, and whether they can locate your important pages.

Has anyone checked in the last six months whether your CDN, firewall or bot protection blocks AI crawlers or AI assistants?

Please export the current AI bot settings from our CDN or bot protection and tell us, for each of Search, Agent and Training traffic, whether it is allowed, challenged or blocked, and on which pages.

Do you publish an up-to-date sitemap that lists the pages you most want found?

Please confirm our sitemap.xml is generated automatically, includes our product, pricing, booking and policy pages, and is listed in robots.txt.

Read

Can agents read you? Whether products, prices, policies and articles are available as text an agent can parse.

Do your key pages (products, services, prices, policies) show their main text without needing JavaScript to run in the visitor's browser?

Please list which of our page templates deliver their main content in the first HTML response and which need JavaScript to show it, starting with product, pricing and policy pages.

Do your product, event, offer or article pages carry structured data (for example Schema.org markup in JSON-LD)?

Please tell us which Schema.org types we publish on product, offer, event and article pages, and whether the values match what the page shows.

Can your site give a clean text or markdown version of a page to an agent that asks for one?

Please check whether our pages answer a request with the header Accept: text/markdown with a markdown version, and tell us what it would take to add it.

Act

Can agents act on your site? Whether the main task (buy, book, subscribe, request a quote) can be completed through standard forms or a documented interface.

Can the main task on your site (buy, book, subscribe or request a quote) be completed with standard web forms and buttons, without a CAPTCHA at every step?

Please walk our main task end to end as a guest and list every step where a CAPTCHA, a custom widget or a pop-up appears.

Do your forms have clear labels and error messages that say what went wrong and how to fix it?

Please check that every field in our main forms has a visible label and that each error message names the field and the fix.

Can a customer complete the main task as a guest, or sign in with a standard login flow such as OAuth rather than a custom one?

Please tell us whether our main task can be completed as a guest, and whether sign-in uses a standard flow such as OAuth with published metadata.

Pay

Can agents pay? Whether full prices are visible before the last step, and whether your payments team has a position on purchases an agent starts.

Trust

Can agents be trusted, and trust you? Whether you can tell verified agents from unknown automation, and whether your terms and policies are public.

Can your team tell verified bots and agents (for example through Web Bot Auth signatures or a verified bot directory) apart from unknown automation?

Please tell us whether our CDN or bot protection checks verified bot signatures (Web Bot Auth) or a verified bot list, and whether we treat verified agents differently from unknown automation.

Are your returns, cancellation, privacy and terms pages public, current and readable without logging in?

Please confirm our returns, cancellation, privacy and terms pages load as text without JavaScript or a login, and are linked from every product or booking page.

When to send them

Send the sentences after the first answers on the self-check, so each one lands against a question you could not answer. Ask for answers in writing by a date, and review them again each quarter or after a redesign, a checkout change or a change of CDN.