Almost everything I have written about AI and your website has been about reading. Can a machine understand what you do, where you do it, what it costs, and will it recommend you as a result.
There is a second thing coming, and it is a different problem.
Agents doing things. Not reading your page, but using it. Getting a quote, checking availability, booking a slot, placing an order. Everything a person could do on your site, done by something acting on their behalf.
This is early. Genuinely early, in a way that a lot of the coverage does not make clear. But something happened recently that is worth understanding, and there is one useful thing you can do about it today.
What Cloudflare has done
There is an emerging browser standard called WebMCP. It lets a website offer agents a set of proper tools rather than making them guess their way around a page built for humans.
The difference matters. At the moment, an agent trying to do something on your site is essentially squinting at screenshots and clicking about, which is slow and goes wrong constantly. With WebMCP, the site can say: here is a function called check_availability, here is what it needs, here is what it gives back.
Cloudflare has launched a developer preview that turns this on with a toggle. No code, nothing changed on your end. If your site sits behind Cloudflare, a switch in the dashboard adds a small bridge that registers tools for visiting agents.
The significance is not the toggle. It is that Cloudflare, which sits in front of a very large slice of the web, has decided this standard is worth backing. That tends to be how these things stop being experiments.
You are not behind
Now let me talk you down, because this is exactly the sort of announcement that makes a business owner feel like the world has moved without them.
This is a developer preview. Not a launch. Not a feature you should have already.
The browser standard is experimental, currently sitting behind a flag in a recent version of Chrome. Most people’s browsers cannot do this yet.
Almost no websites have implemented any of it. Not most small businesses. Not most large ones either.
And here is the practical bit: switching that toggle on does very little unless there is something behind it for agents to actually use. It exposes tools. If your website has no tools to expose, it exposes nothing very interesting.
So no, you have not missed anything. What you are looking at is a starting gun, not a finish line.
The one thing worth doing today
Go and look at how somebody who is ahead has set this up. It takes two minutes and costs nothing.
Find any Shopify shop and add /agents.md to the end of the address.
You will get a file written specifically for AI agents, explaining how to interact with that site. Shopify has been further ahead on this than any other platform, and their default file is effectively a blueprint.
You do not need to understand every line. Read it as a business owner and notice what it is actually doing: telling a machine what actions exist, what they do, and how to use them properly.
That is the shape of what is coming. Seeing one real example is worth more than any amount of explanation from me.
The thinking exercise
Here is what I would actually spend time on, and it requires no technology at all.
Write down everything you would want an agent to be able to do on your website.
Not what your site does now. What it should do.
For a hotel: check availability for particular dates, see what is included, hold a room, book it, add a dietary requirement.
For a trade: check whether you cover a postcode, see whether you have a slot this week, get a rough price for a standard job, book a survey.
For a shop: browse by whatever people actually browse by, check stock, understand postage, buy.
Be ambitious. Software has got dramatically cheaper to build over the last two years, and the things on that list will be far easier to add than they would have been when your site was built. The limit on that list should be your imagination, not your budget.
And you will notice something while writing it: most of those things would be useful to humans too. A person also wants to know whether you cover their postcode without ringing to find out. Nothing on that list is wasted effort even if agents never arrive.
Why it will matter
The strategic point, and it is a simple one.
If an agent is trying to book a hotel room for somebody, and one hotel’s site lets it check dates and hold a room cleanly while the other requires forty seconds of clicking about and often fails, it is going to use the first one.
Not because it prefers that hotel. Because the job gets done.
That is a slightly uncomfortable form of competition, since it has nothing to do with whether your rooms are nicer. But it is the same as being easy to ring rather than hard to ring, which has always decided a certain amount of business.
The businesses that will win here are the ones whose websites can actually do things. Which, again, is not a new idea. It is the same instruction that has always applied: make it easy to buy from you.
When I would actually act
Practically, my advice for a local business is this.
Now: do nothing technical. Look at the Shopify example, write your wish list, and get on with your week.
This year: if you are rebuilding your website anyway, that is when to build the actions in properly. Booking, availability, quoting. Do it because humans want it, and it will be there when agents arrive.
When it matters: when the standard is out of preview, browsers support it by default, and there are agents in the wild actually using it. I will write about it then, and I will not pretend that day has arrived before it has.
There is a lot of money currently being made selling businesses solutions to problems they do not yet have. This is a genuine thing that is genuinely coming, and it is also genuinely not urgent for a plumber in Poulton.
Both of those are true, and I would rather tell you both.
Want to talk about what your website should actually be able to do? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.