Source: Search Engine Journal
Website owners now face two separate competitive fronts in the agentic web: establishing machine-readable identity through LLMs.txt (similar to robots.txt but for language models) and exposing functional capabilities via WebMCP protocols that let AI agents perform tasks on their sites. This splits the visibility problem—discovery of *who you are* from accessibility of *what you do*—which means SEO playbooks don't apply wholesale. A site could be well-indexed by AI but functionally locked down, or vice versa. Platforms that control agent routing (which identities agents check first) and early movers exposing non-trivial capabilities have structural advantages. An agent that can book reservations or check inventory across ten sites has immediate business value regardless of search ranking.