Glossary
Agent readiness, in plain English
Every term you'll meet in our guides, in AgentScore reports and in conversations with your developers and vendors, and what it means for your business. Prefer to read them together? Read the glossary in full.
A
- Accessibility tree The structured view of a page that screen readers and many browser agents use: its headings, links, buttons and form fields, with their names.
- Accessible name The name a button, link or field has in the accessibility tree, from its text, label or aria-label.
- Agent readiness How well AI agents can get into your site, understand it, find their way around it and complete tasks on it.
- Agent traffic Visits from AI agents of every kind.
- Agentic commerce Purchases that an AI agent makes for a shopper.
- AgentScore Our free score out of 100 for agent readiness, across Access (25 points), Readability (25), Navigability (20) and Task completion (30).
- AI agent Software that uses an AI model to do something on the web for a person or a company: read a page, answer a question, compare products or complete a task.
- AI referral A person who arrives at your site by clicking a link in an AI assistant's answer.
- AI search crawler A bot that indexes pages so AI search and assistants can cite and link to them, such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
- Alt text A short text description of an image.
- Assistant fetcher An AI assistant fetching a page in real time because a person asked it something, such as ChatGPT-User or Claude-User.
B
C
- Canonical URL The one address you name as the main version of a page that can be reached in several ways.
- CAPTCHA or challenge A test that tries to tell people from bots, such as picking out images or waiting on a “checking your browser” page.
- CDN Content delivery network: the service that sits in front of your site and delivers it quickly around the world.
- Check One thing AgentScore tests, such as “Buttons and links have names”, reported as a pass, warning or fail, with who usually fixes it.
- Crawls per AI referral How many pages an AI company's agents fetched for every visitor its assistant sent you.
F
G
I
J
L
M
O
R
- Rate limit A cap on how many requests a visitor can make in a given time.
- Raw HTML The page exactly as your server sends it, before any JavaScript runs.
- robots.txt A file at the root of your site that tells crawlers and agents which pages they may visit.
- Run and pass rate A run is one attempt by one agent at a journey.
S
- Server-side rendering (SSR) and static generation Ways of building pages so the content is already in the raw HTML, rather than added afterwards by JavaScript.
- Structured data (schema.org, JSON-LD) Machine-readable facts in your page code, such as a product's name, price and stock, written in the shared schema.org vocabulary, usually as JSON-LD.
T
U
V
W
- WCAG The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the standard for making sites usable by people with disabilities.
- Web Bot Auth A new standard in which agents sign their requests cryptographically, so sites can prove who sent them.
- WebMCP A proposal for offering those same tools from inside your web pages, so a browser agent can call them while it's on your site.
X
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