Joost de Valk, creator of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, has a better architectural answer to separate sites for agents: maintain one site with several interfaces.

Before you rush off to build a separate site for agents: we’ve done that before. Remember m-dot sites? Remember AMP? Parallel versions of your website always drift out of sync, and then they die. The answer isn’t a second website. It’s one source of truth with multiple renderings, where the machine-friendly surface is generated from the same content the human one is.

For website owners, keeping the publishing system accurate matters more than polishing any one rendering. For designers, the concrete consequence is to define the content model and available actions at the system level, then test every interface against the same rules. De Valk on what those interfaces need to support:

A website used to be an HTML thing, in some cases with an API. That’s no longer enough. If your website matters to you, it should at the very least also be an MCP server, and in many cases even ship a command-line client. That way agents can interact with your business directly: check availability, place the order, book the slot.

The specific standards will churn. MCP is today’s answer; something else will come after it. The durable point is this: a website is becoming a bundle of interfaces. One for humans, several for machines, and the machine ones don’t just answer questions, they take actions.

More and more buying decisions happen away from your site: in AI answers, in chat interfaces, in agent-mediated transactions. This is the uncomfortable one. You can rage against it or you can plan for it.

The website doesn’t die in that world. Its role shifts. It becomes the canonical source of truth about your business: the system of record that feeds every surface where the actual decision gets made. If an AI assistant recommends you, it’s because your home base gave it every reason to. Thin, stale, machine-hostile websites simply won’t be recommended.