Someone asks their assistant to book a haircut for Friday afternoon. The agent opens the barber's site, finds the booking form, fills it in and checks with them before sending. If the button is a styled box rather than a real button, the label isn't tied to its field, or the page jumps as it loads, the agent gets it wrong or gives up. Then it books with whichever site worked.
How an agent reads your page
Google's web.dev team lists three ways: screenshots (slow, and the fallback), the HTML, and the accessibility tree, the browser's simple map of every button, link and field with its name and state. Most agents use all three. The team's conclusion: "Everything we suggest to make a site 'agent-ready' also makes sites better for humans."
What the guidance asks for
- Real buttons and links:
<button>and<a>, not a<div>dressed up as one. Where that isn't possible, give it aroleand atabindex. - Labels tied to their inputs with
for, so the agent knows "Email" belongs to that box. - No invisible layers sitting over the controls.
- Controls big enough to see, and
cursor: pointeron anything you can click. - A stable layout: the Book button in the same place on every page.
That's an accessibility checklist. A site that works with a screen reader is most of the way there.
What Google says you can skip
Google's guide to AI features in Search, updated in July, is blunt about the shortcuts sold as AEO and GEO:
- No special files. "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search." llms.txt neither helps nor hurts there.
- No chopping pages into small chunks for AI.
- No page for every keyword variation. Google says that can breach its scaled content abuse policy.
- No special schema for AI. Structured data still earns rich results.
- "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems."
What it does want: content only you could write, clear headings, a fast page that works on a phone, and a site Google can crawl. For a local business, that means a current Google Business Profile, and for a shop, a Merchant Center feed.
WebMCP: telling the agent what it can do
WebMCP is a proposed standard, in a Chrome origin trial and still changing. It lets a site hand an agent a list of tasks, so the agent doesn't have to work them out from the page. A form can carry a tool name and a description in its HTML, or a script can register a tool. The agent calls the tool, and web.dev says that's faster and more accurate than clicking through the page. For anything sensitive, like a payment, the site can ask the person to confirm first.
What we built into forge-build.co.uk
Our own site is our first client, so it gets everything first:
- Start a project is a tool,
start_project. The form names itself and each field says what it's for, so an agent can send your brief. The tool tells the agent to send it only once you've confirmed. - Book a call is a tool,
book_call. It holds a real weekday slot in UK time, and the booking is only final when you click the link in your email. - Our work is a tool,
list_work. It returns the case studies as data, not a page to scrape. - Ask FORGE, the chat box, is a tool too.
- For agents outside a browser, the same tools run on an MCP server, listed in
/.well-known/ai-catalog.json. That version leaves out the chat, because there it would be an open door to our AI bill, and an agent calling it has its own model anyway. - We publish llms.txt anyway. Google doesn't read it, other AI tools do, and it costs nothing.
- Under all of it, the basics: a skip link, real buttons, labelled fields, and tap targets of at least 24 pixels.
Where to start with your own site
- 1 Open your booking page in Chrome DevTools and read its accessibility tree. Every button should have a name.
- 2 Book something on your own site with only the keyboard. Where you get stuck, an agent will too.
- 3 Check that every field has a visible label tied to it.
- 4 Keep your Google Business Profile current: hours, services and booking link.
- 5 Then pick the one task that matters most, the booking, the enquiry or the order, and make it a WebMCP tool.
Agents will book with the businesses whose sites they can use. Answer four quick questions and we'll build yours for free.