Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents • Hacker News Board

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#41

Post by embedding-shape » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

gwerbin wrote: post #28

_verandaguy wrote: post #17

Conspicuously missing: why should I care? I have reduced my online presence to much less than it once was partly because I don't want to feed this machine training data that I've worked hard to make for a human audience.

Like it or not I think "agents browsing the web" is the inevitable near-term future. Some agents will be malicious, many will not. In 2036, HN posters will be complaining about how such-and-such site only works with closed proprietary AI agents, and how their creaky old Mac M5 running Gemma 3 under Ollama can't browse the site properly because it doesn't follow the 2029 RFC XYZ for agent compatibility that nobody eve…

Sure, lets say I eat up all of that and agree with you: How does this website help/not help? Agents already read HTML perfectly fine, saying "Well, you don't serve markdown so this obviously is bad for agents, you're only serving HTML" doesn't really feel like it's contributing anything either in protecting against malicious agents, or how the website only work for some agents but not others.

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#42

Post by danlitt » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

Zero on all metrics. Phew!

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#43

Post by Urgo » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

We couldn't scan this site

403 Forbidden

error code: 1106

The site is blocking our scanner. This may be due to WAF rules, bot detection, or IP-based restrictions.

Perfect :)

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#44

Post by Manfred » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

Around 2010 I met a friend at a bar in San Francisco and within 10 minutes we were approached by someone with a chocolate bar startup. It may have been vaguely associated with developers or maybe I'm misremembering. We got a free sample and I explained I didn't live in the US and I also wasn't an investor. They left and moved on to the next group of people at the bar.

This has always stuck to me as an example of the pinnacle of collective investment delusion that seems to exist in certain circles. They idea that you can shape the world to your product instead of improving the world with your product. You just have to try hard enough.

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#45

Post by zombot » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

"Agent-ready" for me would mean they are all being locked out, given the boot, shown the middle finger, and ideally sent into an endless fractal maze never to return.

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#46

Post by thunderfork » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

"We've finally invented a technology whose most critical strength is that it obviates the need for rigorously structured data!"

"Now, make sure your websites are rigorously structured in such a way that allows the technology to work..."

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#47

Post by frizlab » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

fabiensanglard wrote: post #5

My blog just scored zero! I don't think I will fix it.

My website has some points. At least now I know what to do to be even more AI-unfriendly.

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#48

Post by frizlab » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #31

postalcoder wrote: post #21

It's a shame that Cloudflare rolled out a bunch of neat product announcements under the confusing, noisy umbrella of "Agent Week". Off the top of my head, Artifacts, Email, Mesh (tailscale competitor), all buried.

It's bound to happen sooner or later for every company out there it seems. None of them can keep themselves to "Do one thing and do it well", probably because that means growth eventually stops, and VCs really don't like that, so off in all directions and no direction at the same time we go, and it ends up like that. It's a shame to see the contrast from how CF and others used to be, felt they cared about quality bac…

Yes. I used to like Cloudflare.

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#49

Post by embedding-shape » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #24

Ironically, this feels exactly like the various "semantic web" initiatives, only this time coming directly from the tech megacorps and not the starry-eyed "free web"/"open data" idealists. It will hit exactly the same walls too, namely that the technical details are completely irrelevant - if adopting a standard is actually a negative for websites, because it will separate the site from its users, sites will obviousl…

> if adopting a standard is actually a negative for websites, because it will separate the site from its users, sites will obviously not do it.

Not that I believe this will be how the future turns out, but what if the main users of websites end up being agents? Then adopting the standard ends up being a requirement for survival instead of something negative.

Hopefully and ideally we don't end up there, because then the internet will surely suck for us humans, but I'm not so sure the whole "make platforms/websites open up for the machines" will necessarily fail yet again because of the same issues, can very well be different this time.

Re: Scan your website to see how ready it is for AI agents

#50

Post by SunshineTheCat » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

fnoef wrote: post #6

Agent ready, agent email, agent development, agent agent agent What’s the F is going on? Is the world gone mad or something?

I mostly agree with this sentiment, but I do still find it funny how dramatic and curmudgeony many people on HN are.

We are, after all, talking about some metadata here you are more than welcome to leave off your site.