--- title: "Manifesto: how agents experience you | Am I Ready for Agents?" description: "A dated manifesto in ten short principles for how AI agents experience your business, each backed by a labelled, sourced number. Edition of 4 November 2026." canonical: https://amireadyforagents.com/manifesto site: "Am I Ready for Agents?" last_updated: 2026-11-05 date: 2026-11-04 section: "Learn" --- # Manifesto: how agents experience you | Am I Ready for Agents? > A dated manifesto in ten short principles for how AI agents experience your business, each backed by a labelled, sourced number. Edition of 4 November 2026. Source: https://amireadyforagents.com/manifesto Site: Am I Ready for Agents? Last reviewed: 2026-11-05 # How AI agents experience your business: a manifesto ## In short Ten principles for leaders, written on 4 November 2026. Each states one belief about how AI agents meet a business and carries the number behind it, with its source, its date and a label where the number is a vendor finding. The principles are opinions; the numbers are the evidence. ## 1\. Agents are already your audience Machines read more of the web than people do, and the machines that act for a person arrive every time someone asks about you. Treat them as a customer segment with needs, not as an annoyance in the logs. - 30 Sep 2026 Cloudflare (30 Sep 2026): Daily requests from AI agents on Cloudflare's network grew by more than 1,700 percent over the past year, and more than half of Internet traffic this year was not human. [Cloudflare: The Internet has a second audience (30 Sep 2026)](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web/), read 4 Nov 2026 ## 2\. Most sites have not stated a position A robots.txt written for search engines says nothing about agents. Few sites declare what AI may do with their content, and almost none publish a way for an agent to act. - 17 Apr 2026 Cloudflare Radar (17 Apr 2026): Cloudflare Radar's scan of top domains found 78 percent have a robots.txt, 4 percent declare AI usage preferences with Content Signals, and 3.9 percent support markdown content negotiation. [Cloudflare: Introducing the Agent Readiness score (17 Apr 2026)](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agent-readiness/), read 4 Nov 2026 ## 3\. The cheapest fixes are the ones that matter In a controlled test, a long list of popular measures changed nothing. Two things broke retrieval: an answer hidden in script and a refusal returned to agent user agents. - 19 Oct 2026 Ora's lab found (19 Oct 2026): One docs site served under 19 configurations and probed on 5 topics by a plain-fetch client and a JavaScript-running client (190 probes): only hiding the answer in JavaScript and returning 403 to agents stopped retrieval; llms.txt, JSON-LD, sitemaps and markdown mirrors changed nothing. Vendor claim. [Introducing AgentReady.org (19 Oct 2026)](https://ora.ai/blog/agentready-launch?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto), read 4 Nov 2026 ## 4\. Agents use the front door They go to docs and the home page, and only rarely to machine files. When they do open a machine file, they follow a link to it rather than guess its path. - 19 Oct 2026 Ora's lab found (AgentReady guide, Oct 2026): Agents reached docs pages in 83 percent of traced runs and the home page in 69 percent; .well-known files 23 percent, openapi.json 21 percent where shipped, and sitemap.xml 4 percent. Vendor claim. [AgentReady.org guide](https://agentready.org/?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto), read 4 Nov 2026 ## 5\. Agent readiness changes what is said about you A site an agent can read gets recommended more often, and a site it cannot read gets described from other people's pages. - 8 Oct 2026 Ora's lab found (8 Oct 2026): Agents clearly recommended agent-ready businesses in 20 percent of answers against 11 percent for businesses that were not agent ready (1.9 times), with two blind judges both giving the top grade. Vendor claim. [Ora research: AX is the new AEO (8 Oct 2026)](https://ora.ai/blog/ax-is-the-new-aeo?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto), read 4 Nov 2026 ## 6\. Missing facts are the cost When the agent cannot read you, it does not stop. It answers from somewhere else, and the buyer's question goes unanswered or answered wrongly. - 8 Oct 2026 Ora's lab found (8 Oct 2026): Answers built without reading the business's site were 3.7 times as likely to contain none of the facts the buyer asked for: 25 percent versus 7 percent, across 2,499 graded answers from 131 businesses. Vendor claim. [Ora research: AX is the new AEO (8 Oct 2026)](https://ora.ai/blog/ax-is-the-new-aeo?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto), read 4 Nov 2026 ## 7\. Search is not the thing to block Most sites keep search crawlers and a minority refuse training. The choice is between purposes, and it can be made one purpose at a time. - 30 Sep 2026 Cloudflare (30 Sep 2026): Fewer than 1 percent of sites on Cloudflare block search crawlers, while 17 percent block training. [Cloudflare: The Internet has a second audience (30 Sep 2026)](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web/), read 4 Nov 2026 ## 8\. The scoreboard is public and low Scanning has become cheap and common. The averages are low, which means the sites that do the work stand out for some time. - 5 Nov 2026 Ora, vendor-published (5 Nov 2026): Ora's home page reported 145,922 sites scanned, an average score of 44 and 7 percent at B or above. Vendor claim. [Ora home page](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto), read 5 Nov 2026 ## 9\. Measure the work A number is only worth reporting if the method is. A study of tens of thousands of agent journeys is one way to know what happens; your own task test is another. - 8 Oct 2026 Ora's lab, method: The study ran 37,927 agent journeys on 1,056 business sites across four agent setups on Claude and GPT models; sites were scored on 24 August 2026 and journeys ran in late August and September 2026. Vendor claim. [Ora research: AX is the new AEO (8 Oct 2026)](https://ora.ai/blog/ax-is-the-new-aeo?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto), read 4 Nov 2026 ## 10\. Write the position down A default is a decision somebody else made. Write down who may enter, what may be asked of an agent and who owns the answer, and review it each quarter. - 17 Apr 2026 Cloudflare Radar (17 Apr 2026): Cloudflare Radar's scan of top domains found 78 percent have a robots.txt, 4 percent declare AI usage preferences with Content Signals, and 3.9 percent support markdown content negotiation. [Cloudflare: Introducing the Agent Readiness score (17 Apr 2026)](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agent-readiness/), read 4 Nov 2026 ## Sources 1. [Cloudflare: The Internet has a second audience (30 Sep 2026)](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web/) (blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web), read 4 Nov 2026. 2. [Cloudflare: Introducing the Agent Readiness score (17 Apr 2026)](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agent-readiness/) (blog.cloudflare.com/agent-readiness), read 4 Nov 2026. 3. [Introducing AgentReady.org (19 Oct 2026)](https://ora.ai/blog/agentready-launch?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto) (ora.ai/blog/agentready-launch), read 4 Nov 2026. Vendor claim. 4. [AgentReady.org guide](https://agentready.org/?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto) (agentready.org), read 4 Nov 2026. Vendor claim. 5. [Ora research: AX is the new AEO (8 Oct 2026)](https://ora.ai/blog/ax-is-the-new-aeo?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto) (ora.ai/blog/ax-is-the-new-aeo), read 4 Nov 2026. Vendor claim. 6. [Ora home page](https://ora.ai/?utm_source=amireadyforagents.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=manifesto) (ora.ai), read 5 Nov 2026. Vendor claim. Last reviewed 5 November 2026 Reviewed 5 November 2026. [6 sources](#sources), each with the day it was read.