Am I Ready for Agents?

How to verify AI agents and bots: a plain-English guide

In short

A bot's name is text that anyone can copy, so a name proves nothing. Verification checks something harder to fake: a signature on the request, a published address range or a registration with a named person. Ask your CDN or bot vendor whether it verifies today, and decide what a verified agent may do.

Why a name is not enough

Any script can send GPTBot as its name. Amazon said Muse did not identify itself when it blocked it, which shows identification is now a commercial argument.

What verification looks like

  • 28 Oct 2026

    Zocdoc requires agents to register before they can book, and asks for a named human contact during registration.

    Zocdoc for Agents (markdown), read 4 Nov 2026
  • 30 Sep 2026

    Cloudflare said on 30 September 2026 that operators including OpenAI, Google and AWS cryptographically sign their agents' requests, and that it sees more than 500 billion verified bot requests a week.

    Cloudflare: The Internet has a second audience (30 Sep 2026), read 4 Nov 2026
  • Read 4 Nov 2026

    Web Bot Auth is an IETF draft in which an agent signs its requests with HTTP Message Signatures so a site can check who operates it.

    IETF draft: Web Bot Auth architecture, read 4 Nov 2026

What to ask

  1. Does our bot protection check signed requests or a verified-bot list today?
  2. What may a verified agent do: read, add to basket, check out?
  3. How do we treat an agent that does not identify itself?

See the decision on telling verified agents from bots.

Sources

  1. Retail Gazette: Amazon blocks Meta's Muse (22 Sep 2026) (retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2026/09/amazon-blocks-metas-new-ai-shopping-agent-from-its-website), read 4 Nov 2026. Reported by trade press.
  2. Zocdoc for Agents (markdown) (zocdoc.com/business/welcome-agents.md), read 4 Nov 2026.
  3. Cloudflare: The Internet has a second audience (30 Sep 2026) (blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web), read 4 Nov 2026.
  4. IETF draft: Web Bot Auth architecture (datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture), read 4 Nov 2026.

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