Glossary · Digital Transformation
What is agentic SEO?
Short answer
Agentic SEO is the practice of making content and websites easy for AI agents to find, understand, trust and act on, not only for people using a search engine. It covers clear structure, direct answers, structured data, accessible interfaces and machine-readable facts, so assistants and browser agents can cite your pages or complete tasks on them.
How it differs from classic SEO
Classic SEO aims for rankings and clicks from a results page. Agentic SEO assumes that a growing share of “visitors” are AI systems working on someone’s behalf: an assistant researching vendors, an AI browser summarising a page, or a browser agent trying to book a demo. Success means being understood correctly and used, whether or not a person ever sees your page.
The term is also used for using AI agents to do SEO work, such as audits and content updates. Here it means optimising for agents.
What it involves
- Answer-first content: state the answer in the opening lines, then explain. This overlaps with answer engine optimisation.
- Machine-readable facts: structured data for articles, products, FAQs and organisations; consistent names for your company, products and authors.
- Agent-usable interfaces: semantic HTML, labelled forms and stable URLs so agents can complete tasks.
- Crawler access: a deliberate policy in robots.txt for AI crawlers, and fast pages that render without heavy scripts.
- Trust signals: named authors, dates, sources and clear policies that assistants can quote.
How to measure it
Track referrals from AI assistants, citations of your pages in AI answers, crawler activity in your logs, and branded searches. Clicks alone understate the impact, because many answers are given without a visit.
