How to make your website discoverable to AI agents

Last reviewed 2026-07-06 · Agent Ardvark field notes

AI agents are becoming a real traffic channel: assistants that book, buy, compare and research on their users' behalf. In 2026 there is now a standard way to be visible to them, and it takes about ten minutes. Here is the whole process.

Step 1: know what you are advertising

Agents care about things they can use: an API, an MCP server, an ordering system, a booking endpoint, a data feed, another agent. Pick the one or two capabilities of your site that an agent acting for a customer would want. If you have an API with an OpenAPI description, start there.

Step 2: create your ai-catalog.json

The file format is defined by the ARD specification. You can write it by hand from our annotated example, or answer a plain-English form in our free generator and download the result. Either way you need: your site's name, and for each capability a name, a type, a URL to its description, and ideally two to five example questions it answers.

Step 3: host it at the well-known address

The file must be reachable at https://yourdomain.com/.well-known/ai-catalog.json. This is the only address agents check. How you put it there depends on your platform; we keep a platform-by-platform guide covering WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel and plain servers.

Step 4: verify it

Paste your domain into Agent Ardvark. If the file is reachable and valid against the official schema, you get a clean bill of health; if not, you get the exact violations to fix. Common failures: the file returning HTML instead of JSON (your platform is serving a 404 page), a malformed identifier URN, or both url and data on one entry.

Step 5: keep it alive

Site redesigns, platform migrations and CDN changes silently break well-known files all the time. Re-check after any significant change to your site. The catalog is only worth anything while agents can actually fetch it.

Frequently asked questions

My site is just a portfolio or blog. Is this worth doing?

The immediate winners are sites with something an agent can use (APIs, bookings, commerce, data). For pure content sites the benefit today is smaller, but the file is free to publish and the standard's content story is developing.

Will agents visit immediately?

Publishing the catalog makes you discoverable; registries and agent platforms are indexing the well-known address as adoption grows through 2026. Early publishing is cheap insurance for that wave.