PlateTaleSEO was for Google. What is the equivalent for AI agents?
SEO optimised for one moment: appearing in a list of links a human would click. Agents skip the list. They act. So the thing worth optimising moves from being found to being usable.
The new win condition
With a search engine, success was position one. With an agent, success is the task finishing on your site — the order placed, the booking made, the quote returned. Being mentioned by a model and then failing at step four of checkout is not a win.
Three layers, only one of them familiar
- Retrieval: does the model know your product exists? Closest to classic SEO — content, crawlability, citations, structured data.
- Comprehension: can an agent extract correct, current facts — price, availability, terms — from your live pages?
- Completion: can it finish the journey? This is the layer nobody optimises for yet, and the one that decides revenue.
What to measure
Not rank. Task completion rate per journey, the step where agents drop out, and how those numbers move over time as models change. It is closer to conversion-rate optimisation than to keyword work — the visitor is just software.
Where to start
Keep doing the retrieval work; it still matters. Then find out what happens after an agent arrives. PlateTale tests exactly that, and tells you which step to fix first.