How to optimize for agentic search with Semrush

AI agents can search, compare options, and complete actions on behalf of users.

That means they’re deciding which brands to interact with and show to users.

If your site is structured in a way that agents can reliably interpret, they’re more likely to stay and engage. That includes reducing JavaScript-heavy elements and ensuring your content is easy to parse.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use Semrush to improve your site’s readiness to be visible and chosen in agentic search experiences.

But first, let’s define what agentic readiness actually means.

What agentic readiness actually means

Agentic readiness is whether an AI agent can land on your site, understand your content, and complete tasks. Like accessing pricing information, submitting a form, or making a purchase.

This builds on AI visibility.

The same signals that help your brand appear in AI-generated answers also determine whether AI agents can access, interpret, and use your content.

For example, someone asks their AI agent to find and evaluate software vendors. The agent may review multiple sites, extract pricing and features, and narrow down options.

If one site presents that information clearly and supports straightforward interactions, it can continue the process. If another hides key details behind PDFs or relies on complex client-side interactions, the process may stop there.

To support these workflows, your site needs to be easy for AI agents to access, interpret, and interact with. This process is called Agentic Search Optimization (ASO).

1. Ensure AI crawlers can access your site

Use Semrush’s Site Audit tool to evaluate access to these pages.

Simply launch the tool, indicate the pages to crawl, and run the audit.

Once the audit is complete, review your AI Search Health score. This reflects how optimized your pages are for AI search.

A higher score indicates that your content is more accessible to AI crawlers, better structured for understanding, and more likely to be included in AI-generated answers.

Review the “Blocked from AI Search” widget to see which AI crawlers you’re blocking via your robots.txt file (which tells crawlers which pages they should and shouldn’t access) and which pages are affected.

If key bots are blocked, your content won’t be accessible to AI crawlers.

Go to the “Issues” tab and select the “AI Search” filter to see if your site has any problems that may affect your ability to appear in AI-generated answers, such as:

Links with no anchor text
Pages with only one incoming internal link
Pages that require content optimization
Llms.txt not found

Next, use Log File Analyzer to understand if and how AI bots actually crawl your site.

Upload or connect your server logs, and filter for user-agents like GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, and ClaudeBot.

Use this report to analyze:

Which pages receive the most bot activity
What status codes bots encounter
Whether certain pages or file types are being skipped

2. Identify and optimize your key pages for clarity and structure

Next, identify your key pages to optimize.

These are the pages of your site that explain who you are, what you offer, and why you’re relevant, along with action pages like demo requests, signups, or contact forms to ensure AI crawlers can access them. Make a list of these URLs in a spreadsheet.

If these pages aren’t accessible or optimized to be found, AI agents can’t interpret your content or complete tasks like retrieving pricing or submitting forms.

AI agents rely on what’s explicitly available on the page. So if any key information is missing, unclear, or hard to extract, it’s less likely to surface in AI answers or agentic actions.

Start by reviewing whether each page clearly communicates the essentials:

What you offer
Who it’s for
How it’s different
What the next step is

Then focus on how that information is presented.

Use Semrush’s On Page SEO Checker to review and improve how your content is structured.

Start by launching the tool and configuring your campaign with your target pages and keywords.

Once the analysis is complete, you’ll land on the “”Overview”” report.

Here, you’ll see a list of pages prioritized based on potential impact, traffic opportunity, and ease of implementation.

Review where key details (such as pricing, features, or availability) may be difficult to locate or interpret.

Structure your content so it’s easy to extract and reuse:

Use clear descriptive headings that match the topic of each section
Ensure each section directly answers the question or topic introduced by the heading
Break up dense text into short paragraphs or bulleted lists
Keep related information grouped together so sections can stand on their own

These principles align with established search engine guidance and emerging standards like Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which emphasize clear, accessible, and machine-readable information.

Make it a priority to ensure your key pages are both complete and well-structured.

3. Review your structured data

Structured data’s impact on AI visibility isn’t clearly established. Current evidence suggests AI agents rely on visible page content, not schema markup, when extracting and summarizing information.

That said, it’s still worth maintaining as part of your SEO foundation. It helps search engines understand the entities on your site (like your brand and products) and the relationships between them.

Use the Site Audit tool to identify structured data issues on your site.

Go to the “Issues” tab and search for “structured” to identify if you have any pages with invalid structured data.

For each page, you’ll see the structured data type and the specific fields that are missing or incorrect.

Focus on schema types tied to your most important pages:

Product for product pages
LocalBusiness or Restaurant for local pages
Organization for administrative details about your business

4. Measure your AI visibility

Visibility is the first condition for being optimized for agentic search. Before agents can use your site, they need to find it.

Use the Visibility Overview report within Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit to get a baseline across AI platforms. Metrics like mentions, citations, and cited pages show whether your visibility is growing or declining — and how you stack up against competitors.

Check your Cited Pages to understand which of your pages AI systems are actually citing.

To look for any of your specific key pages, just use the “Filter by URL” option.

Review your AI visibility regularly to keep an eye on progress, identify gaps, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

To grow your AI visibility, focus on:

Finding questions and topics that your audience is asking AI
Publishing original content on those topics
Being visible with consistent messaging across third-party websites like YouTube, LinkedIn, and trusted industry publications
Growing your mentions and positive sentiment across the web

Make your site agentic-ready with Semrush

The SEO fundamentals you optimize for today will continue to shape how AI agents interact with your site. But you won’t always know when you’re being skipped or chosen.

Semrush helps you see why — and what to fix. Check for crawl access problems, unclear content on key pages, and whether competitors are being mentioned in AI answers more than you.

With Semrush One, all the tools covered in this article are in one place — so you can continuously improve your visibility across traditional and AI-driven search.

Source_link