In February 2026, I wrote that serving markdown to AI agents solves the study issue and not the doing problem. Seven months on, one platform, Shopify, has touched the doing problem, and the markdown mirrors, the preparedness scores, and GEO, the site for getting cited in AI answers, have not.
The text-only versions now being served to AI do not merely neglect to transport actions; they band them out. A markdown mirror of a web leaf is prose. Whatever a visitant could have pressed is gone by the period the device receives it.
A Website No Human Will Ever Open Needs No Heavy JavaScript And No Visual Layer
Heavy JavaScript is entirely unnecessary for a website that is not several benevolent of web app, and the visual tier is not essential for machines either, particularly if the structural tier is healthy. So put up a website that you cognize for certain no individual volition always open, as an exercise, and the two go. Layout, navigation, the scheme system, the depiction treatments, and the ranking that tells an eye anywhere to district all go alongside them, and nothing is lost.
Structured Data Is The Machine-Only Surface Websites Already Have
Structured data is satisfied written for machines and invisible to people. JSON-LD solitary is on 55.6% of the websites W3Techs measures, as of September 2026. Structured data survives the exercise since a individual was never its audience.
The markdown mirrors and the readiness scores released since February are newer members of the identical family. Both answer the identical question, which is what this leaf is. The mirrors answer nothing concerning what can be done alongside it. The preparedness scanner checks whether WebMCP tools are registered on the page, and says nothing concerning whether they work.
Semantic HTML Is The Floor For Exposing Actions And A Declared Tool Surface Is The Ceiling
A website has two routes to structurally disclose its actions to a machine, semantic HTML and a declared tool surface, and the two work. Back in the exercise, the website no individual volition always open; the device turns up to do item fairly than peruse something. It wants to cancel a subscription or buy the thing, and there is no display and nobody to click.
- The flat is semantic HTML and accessibility features. Native elements say what a item is and what it does. A <button> is a button, a <label> names a field, a <form> has a mark and a method. Any website alongside a form either has this or should have it already, for reasons that predate agents by decades.
- The ceiling is a declared tool surface. WebMCP is the current proposal: the leaf registers the functions an delegate may call, and the delegate calls them without inferring item from the markup.
Ideally, you build the ceiling. The ceiling is motionless a projected standard, so the flat is what matters, and the flat is damaged for most websites.
Fixing The Floor Is The Work, And It Is Measured Every Year
WebAIM’s 2026 evaluation of the top myriad residence pages established 95.9% failing WCAG 2, up from 94.8% in 2025, reversing six years of small improvements. Errors averaged 56.1 per page, up 10.1% in a year. Pages using ARIA, the attributes for adding accessibility semantics to markup, averaged 59.1 errors against 42 for pages without it. WebAIM is careful to say those pages were additionally additional complex. The markup that reaches for additional semantics is motionless the markup carrying additional errors.
Three of the six most average failures are the actions going missing. Form inputs alongside no tag were on 51% of residence pages, bare links on 46.3%, and bare buttons on 30.6%. A clasp alongside no name is a clasp an delegate cannot inform distinct from the one next to it. Every one of those is a fix on the leaf all visitant already uses. A text-only type leaves all of them anywhere they are and adds a file.
On those pages the HTML is not semantic, so the accessibility tree an delegate plant through (how AI agents see your website covers the mechanism) is missing the identical things a display audience is missing. An unlabelled input is gone from both. A study accepted to CHI 2026 ran Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 as a computer-use delegate on 60 mundane tasks and measured its achievement falling from 78.3% under default conditions to 41.7% keyboard-only and 28.3% alongside the viewport magnified to 150%. It did not test damaged markup, it tested the delegate operating the way group who depend on assistive innovation work.
An Agent That Cannot Tell Whether It Worked Will Do It Twice
On a project I worked on, an AI delegate was set to present web forms, and two things bankrupt it: invalid HTML (obviously), and the deficiency of any programmatic achievement or error feedback. The delegate would try to present again, since it did not cognize it had submitted successfully.
The form worked. A individual would have seen the confirmation and stopped. The delegate could not, since the confirmation was rendered for eyes, so it repeated the request. Every copy order, copy ticket and copy signup out of that form is the website’s missing feedback, not the agent’s mistake. The invalid HTML is a flat problem. The missing feedback is one a form can have on a absolutely valid page.
After a device does something, it have to be told what happened, in a form it can read. Nothing in a text-only type says item concerning that, and neither does the preparedness score. That is the catalog the exercise produces: disclose what can be done, create it callable, study what happened.
The Actions Machines Can Call Today Were Installed By A Platform
Shopify switched on WebMCP tools for all storefront built on Liquid, its own theme language, on August 5, 2026: catalog search, cart, checkout and guideline lookup, live by default, nothing to install. In August, it was the lone location I knew of alongside a declared tool exterior live at scale, and the merchants did not build it. I checked three storefronts the next day and all three loaded the identical adapter manuscript from Shopify’s CDN, since the phase wrote it formerly and serves it everywhere. The tool descriptions and results are instructions to the device caller, the checkout tool moved the browser to the checkout leaf and told it not to navigate again, and a hunt outcome told it which tool to attain for next, and no merchant had to peruse a term of them.
The tools peruse the identical catalog, cart, and checkout the individual storefront does, so they could not drift, and they disbursal the merchant nothing. On August 6, the peruse way worked; a catalog hunt returned products and prices, and the purchasing way died on an inner error. I have not re-run it since. Shopify told its earnings call on August 5 that AI-driven traffic and orders had tripled twelvemonth complete year, and that assertion describes humans arriving from AI answers and purchasing the way humans continually have, so whether a device has called those tools is motionless an open question. Parts of that list, expose, create callable, report, are being satisfied on person else’s schedule, for group who were not asked.
GEO Optimizes The Half That Cannot Act
We need to conversation concerning what GEO is, and what it isn’t.
GEO, generative motor optimisation, focuses on getting cited, or recommended, in that LLM answer, and it is entirely accurate that citation is what pays today, so there is no need to contend it. It is how group arrive; it is measurable adequate to sell, and telling a endeavor to disregard it would be wrong.
GEO has entirely nothing to do alongside the action. What it does touch, how describable a leaf is, is what SEO already touched.
GEO is sold as SEO for additional mighty systems. What makes those systems additional mighty is that they can act. So the site named for the new systems is the one that does not location what makes them new.
The defence is that act is a bet on a forthcoming that has not arrived. But all sole business that can citation you today is operating on a type of itself that additionally does additional (the agentic browser landscape lists them), during operating alongside the another vendors in the area on the protocols to do it. It is incorrect to halt there.
The Visual Layer Can Wait Until The Structure And The Actions Work
A website has three layers: the ocular one, the structure, and the content. The actions live in the structure. Take distant the ocular tier and keep the another two, and a device can use what is left. Take distant the construction as fine and keep lone the content, which is what a text-only type does, and the device can lone peruse concerning it. Machine-First Architecture, the way I have been arguing websites have to be built, method the construction and the actions have to activity on their own, alongside or without the ocular tier on top. The ocular tier stays for the people, and it is the final item to concern about.
- Sort what you assist machines into describable and doable. Expect a complete archetypal heap and an bare second one. The sorting takes a few hours.
- Find out who installed any is in the second pile. If item is there, a phase likely put it there, and the conditions sit in records you may never have opened. Read it.
- Check what your form says back. Submit it and peruse the reply the way a device would. If the lone sign it worked is a green box, an AI volition apt battle alongside it.
- Fix the flat before purchasing a ceiling. Run WAVE, the checker WebAIM’s evaluation is built on, against the leaf alongside your most crucial form, and figure the unlabelled inputs, bare links, and bare buttons. Those three are among the six most average failures in WebAIM’s 95.9%, and they are the three that create actions disappear. A declared tool exterior does not fix the leaf it hands the delegate rear to.
A type of your website built for machines is the entire point. A text-only version alongside the actions taken out is a brochure. And it’s served to the person most enthusiastic to act.
You could create an disagreement that this makes the pamphlet pointless.
More Resources:
- The Technical SEO Audit Needs A New Layer
- AI Visibility Used To Mean Citation. Late June 2026, It Starts To Mean Transaction
- Google Answers If Some Sites Can Ignore GEO And Just Focus On SEO
This article was initially published on No Hacks.
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
