Website visitors have always primarily been of two types: human users and automated bots.
People manually browse pages, read content, click buttons, fill out forms, and purchase products or services.
Bots, on the other hand, are automated systems designed to perform specific tasks. Common examples include Google crawlers that index pages to show them in search results, SEO tools that analyze a site’s structure, or automated systems that monitor prices, availability, and updates.
Today, however, the web is beginning to welcome a new category of visitors: AI agents.
What are AI agents?
An AI agent is an intelligent system capable not only of reading information but also of performing actions on behalf of the user.
Unlike a classic bot, an AI agent can interpret a request, plan the necessary steps, and carry out real operations by autonomously navigating through the pages of a website.
This type of interaction comes into play when a user makes a request to tools based on artificial intelligence, such as virtual assistants or advanced conversational platforms.
Instead of just providing a text response, the system can interact directly with sites and online services to complete a task.
A user might ask: “Find the cheapest flight to Milan next weekend and complete the booking.”
At that point, the agent could open the airline’s website, compare available options, select dates and preferences, automatically fill in the required fields, and guide the user through to final confirmation.
In practice, it doesn’t just “answer”—it acts!
AI agents don’t see the site like people do
When a person visits a website, they see graphics, colors, animations, layouts, and visual elements designed to make the experience pleasant and intuitive.
AI agents, however, interpret the site through machine-readable representations.
To understand a page, they mainly use three combined methods:
- Visual analysis via screenshots: some agents take a screenshot of the page and try to identify elements such as buttons, menus, search bars, and input fields. They can also interpret visual cues like colors, sizes, and element positions to understand which actions are most important.
- HTML and DOM reading: agents can read the page code and its structure. The DOM is, simply put, the “map” of the site that the browser creates to organize all elements (text, images, buttons) while the page is loading. This allows them to understand how they are connected to each other.
For example, if a “Buy Now” button is located inside a product container, the agent understands that the action belongs to that specific item. - Accessibility tree interpretation: the browser generates a simplified version of the page used by assistive technologies. Here, truly important elements like buttons, links, input fields, and menus are highlighted.
For AI agents, it is a sort of simplified site map, useful for quickly understanding the main functions of the page.
For this reason, the more a site is well-structured, accessible, and semantically correct, the easier it will be for AI agents to interpret as well.
The web is preparing for AI agents
The arrival of AI agents is starting to change the way websites are designed. It is no longer enough to create beautiful interfaces: it is becoming increasingly important to build clear, structured sites that are easily interpretable by artificial intelligence.
For this reason, technical aspects such as accessibility, semantic HTML, structured data, APIs, and new protocols like WebMCP are becoming increasingly important, as they are designed specifically to facilitate interaction between websites and AI agents.
However, this is still a new and constantly evolving development. Intervening without knowing exactly what to do can create compatibility and accessibility issues, or even worsen the site’s structure and SEO.
This is precisely why it is important to approach these changes carefully, avoiding improvised interventions and evaluating which technologies actually make sense for your project.
The future of the web will be increasingly oriented toward AI agents, but the real difference will be made by the quality with which these innovations are integrated into websites.
If you want to understand how ready your site already is for this evolution or want to start making it more compatible with AI agents without risking technical errors, we can help you analyze the structure, accessibility, and technical aspects of the project, identifying the most suitable solutions for your site!
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