The SEO’s Guide to Agentic Commerce — Whiteboard Friday

So how do I optimize my websites for agentic AI to make sure that it can process, understand, and serve my data well? The first thing to think about is no JavaScript. I don’t think I need to dwell on this. We’ve been singing this song for so long. Sadly, we are still singing it because these systems don’t execute JavaScript.

The next thing is markdowns. This is an analogy I like to use when I’m describing the difference between HTML and markdown. Now, HTML is what we’ve traditionally used, and HTML is for web browsers.

Now serving an agent HTML is like me coming to your house and saying, “Hey, can I have spaghetti?” And you’re like, “Yeah, go to the kitchen.” And I go to the kitchen, and I’m like, “Where are the knives? Where’s the tomato? What am I supposed to do here?”

Whereas markdown is me saying, “Here, this is where everything is. This is the recipe, and this is how you get the best spaghetti.” It is the most efficient way of serving AI your data because it uses fewer tokens. It only shifts the data that it needs to, and that helps it.

Remember context window? That helps it perform the most tasks in that context window.

The next thing I’m going to talk about, and this is really important for retail sites, is optimizing and feeding the data you already have. Remember feeds? They’re sexy again. Remember Google Merchant that you’ve forgotten, and you never optimized? They’re sexy again, and why?

These are all concepts that are sexy again because they’re efficient ways of serving data to agents, and they’re already there. You have them in your toolbox. Dig them out, polish them, and make them usable.

And then, finally, structured data. This is easy. We’ve talked about how these systems don’t understand language. But they understand structured data. So why wouldn’t you use it?