Agent-Ready

This is the spanner work.

Five installs, each with a pass test phrased so a machine could grade it, because a checklist you can argue with is a checklist that never gets finished. And one rule that makes the whole thing survivable: you are not making your business agent-ready. You are making one service agent-ready.

The Recommendation makes the case. If you haven’t read it, start there. This guide assumes you are already convinced and want the build order.

One service, not the whole business

Agent-readiness across everything you sell is a program. It has phases and a budget and a steering group and it dies in month four. Agent-readiness for one service is a fortnight. So pick the one. Not the one you like doing, and not the one you wish you sold more of. Pick the service that brings your best work at your best margin, the one you would take ten more of tomorrow. Every install below is scoped to it alone: one price, one bookable path, one page, one set of proof, one identity.

The reason is not just workload. A single service done properly gives you a template. You learn where your data is a mess, which directory still has your old phone number, and which of your claims you cannot actually evidence. You learn it once, on a small surface, and the second service takes about half as long.

Install one, a price a machine can read

An agent sorting five plumbers needs a number. Not your number, a number. A from-figure, a fixed figure, or a range. Any honest shape works. What does not work is “call for a quote”. Nobody has published what an assistant does with a business that gives it no number, and I am not going to invent it. What you can go and watch for yourself: ask one to compare five of your competitors on price and see which ones it can actually rank. The ones with a figure get sorted. The ones without get a sentence.

The objection arrives immediately and deserves a straight answer: no, you are not publishing your margin. You are publishing the shape of the number. A hot water system replacement from $1,850, say, which is my number and not yours, more if the unit has to move, more again if the switchboard needs work. That is not your price book. It is the thing a buyer has spent all afternoon trying to find out, and the thing every competitor is too nervous to say. Say it and you become the reference point the others get compared against.

The pass test: can an agent state your price shape and your starting figure without ringing you?

Install two, a way to book that answers

Agentic booking is live. Most advice about it runs well ahead of what has actually shipped, so be exact.

It has already left the US, and the detail matters more than the headline. In the US, Google’s AI Mode books restaurants through OpenTable, Resy and Tock with no Labs opt-in and no subscription. Event tickets run through Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats, and beauty and wellness appointments through Booksy, Fresha and Vagaro, both still behind a US Labs opt-in. Flights and hotels have named partners and no launch date. Since April 2026 restaurant booking has reached eight more markets, Australia among them, and it is restaurants only. Here the detail matters most, because this is the part written about you. Google has named a partner set for the United Kingdom, eight platforms including TheFork, SevenRooms, ResDiary and OpenTable. It has published no Australian partner list at all. Do not read the British list as ours: TheFork shut its Australian operation on 31 March 2024, and Foodhub, Dojo and DesignMyNight are British operators. So an Australian operator cannot currently name the platform an agent would book them through, and no beauty, wellness or trade appointment partner has been named outside the US at all. Notice what every one of those has in common. The agent transacts through a booking platform. It does not transact through a website like yours.

So the instruction has two halves, and for most readers of this guide the first half is short. If you run a restaurant, salon or clinic, you have an agentic booking partner: be listed on it properly, with real availability, because that is the only route by which an agent books you at any volume today. If you are in a trade, you do not have one. Nobody has announced one, and outside the US nobody has named a beauty or wellness partner either. That is not a gap in your business and there is nothing for you to sign up to. Either way, keep your Google Business Profile accurate, because that is what the agent reads first.

The second half is for humans, and it is not optional. Install one path by which a job can be requested with nobody awake: a booking link, a live calendar, or a stated response window you actually honour. The burst pipe at 9pm does not wait for your business hours. A general-purpose browser agent can already fill in a form on your own site, click by click, and a few will. But nobody is pushing volume down that route, so do not build for it. Build it for the person the agent hands the shortlist to. That is where the money still is.

The pass test: can a job be requested at 9pm without a human awake, and does something happen when it is?

Install three, the page that owns the service

One URL for the service. Not a section on a services page, not a tab. One page whose whole job is that one service.

Write it from real buyer questions: the ones in your last ten phone calls, not the ones you assume. About five recur: what does it cost, how long does it take, do I need to be home, what happens if it turns out worse than you thought, and how soon can you come. The temptation is to spin those into five separate pages for five separate keywords. Resist it, at least until this page is finished. Answer all five here, in plain language, with numbers where you have them, so the page a machine lands on is the one that ends the question instead of starting a hunt through your navigation.

Then the one reason to choose you, on the same page. Not “quality workmanship and honest service”. Something that could be false and isn’t, with its proof beside it rather than on a testimonials page three clicks away.

This is not a brochure page. It is an answer page. The difference matters more than it used to, because on SparkToro’s 2026 measurement more than two-thirds of US Google searches now end without a click. If your answer is not the answer, the answer is somebody else’s.

The pass test: does the page answer the five questions buyers actually ask, before they ask them?

Install four, proof a machine can verify

Your own claims about yourself are worth roughly nothing to a machine, for the same reason they are worth nothing to a wary buyer. What counts is what can be checked somewhere you do not control.

Proof & Reputation sets out the trust stack for a human reader, from your own claims at the bottom to third-party verification at the top. This install is the same stack made machine-legible, which in practice means dragging the top layers somewhere that carries a URL, a count and a date.

That means reviews with a count and a date on a platform an agent can read, and enough recency that the profile looks alive. It means outcomes with specifics in them: the job, the suburb, the timeframe, the number. It means credentials and licence numbers that resolve to an official register when someone goes looking, not a logo on a footer.

Pick your three strongest claims about this service. Then ask, for each one, where a sceptic would go to confirm it. If the answer is “our website”, it is not proof yet. It is an assertion with a nice font.

The pass test: can a sceptical machine confirm your three strongest claims from sources you do not control?

Install five, one identity everywhere

Same name, same address, same phone, same hours, everywhere you appear.

Conflicting data does not average out. A human seeing two phone numbers assumes one is old and rings the newer one. A machine has no basis for that guess, so it either picks wrong or hedges. Nobody publishes what a mismatch costs you, and anyone quoting a figure invented it. What is certain is that it is cheap to fix, and that you will never be told when it cost you a job.

The tedious version of this install is the real one. Log into your Google Business Profile, your website footer, your invoicing system, and the three directories that rank for your trade in your area. Make them agree to the character, including whether you are Pty Ltd, whether you use “St” or “Street”, and whether Saturday is 8 to 12 or 8 to 1. This is the one install I cannot size for you, because it depends on how many listings exist somewhere with your name on them, and you do not know that number yet. Finding out is the first thing this install does.

There is a second reason to do this one properly, and it is the only forward-looking claim in this guide. Every agent standard that landed in 2026 rests on the same footing: a domain you provably own, publishing facts that agree with each other. Agentic Resource Discovery keys trust to the domain serving your ai-catalog.json. Agent-to-agent routing passed 150 organisations and real production use. Agent payments went to the FIDO Alliance so no single vendor owns them. All of it is enterprise-facing with no announced on-ramp for a local business, so ignore the acronyms. The prerequisite is the thing you were going to do anyway, which makes install five the one piece of this guide that is not a bet.

The pass test: do your site, your Google profile and your top three directories agree to the character?

The wiring, and what to skip

Hand this section to whoever runs your site. If nobody runs your site, do two things and skip the rest. Paste your service page URL into Google’s Rich Results Test and read what comes back. If it reports a price, a rating or an opening hour that is not written on the page a human can see, delete it or make the page say it. That is the one mistake that actually costs you. If it reports nothing at all, you are fine for now. Schema is worth having and it is not worth paying a stranger four figures for.

Mark up the service page in JSON-LD: the business, the service, the price shape. The one rule that matters is Google’s long-standing one: do not mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page. If the markup says the price starts at your from-figure, the page has to say so too. Markup describing what the page does not show is a spam risk, and it is the most common thing a cheap schema plugin gets wrong.

Then what to skip. Do not build FAQ markup expecting a rich result: Google put the deprecation notice on that documentation on 7 May 2026 and the appearance is gone. FAQPage is still a valid type and existing markup harms nothing, so leave it. And do not buy an llms.txt, which The Recommendation also sets out the evidence against. Google’s own guidance states you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or Markdown to appear in Search, and that maintaining them will neither harm nor help your rankings. The same page says structured data is not required for generative AI search. Read that twice before paying for a package built on the opposite claim. Schema still earns its keep, because it removes ambiguity about your facts and keeps you eligible for rich results. That is the whole claim. It does not buy citations.

The machine test

Now grade it. Open an AI assistant you have never used for this, and ask it, cold, to find someone who does your service in your area, compare the options on price and availability, and book one.

Do not help it. Do not use your business name. Watch where it stalls.

That last instruction is what separates this from the interrogation in The Second Opinion. That one says your name out loud and reads what the machine says back about you: absent, wrong, stale, or outshone. This one withholds your name and reads whether the machine can carry a stranger from question to booking at all. Reputation there, plumbing here. Run both, a week apart, and never merge them, because a business name in the prompt contaminates this read completely.

Run it three times across a few days: assistants are not deterministic and one run is an anecdote. What you are reading is not your position, which wobbles between runs and tells you nothing you can act on. It is the stall, which will not move until you fix something.

It will stall somewhere. Read the stalls in order, and read the last one honestly. If it never surfaces you, your identity or your service page is the problem. If it surfaces you but cannot compare you, your price shape is missing. If it compares you and then routes the booking elsewhere and you are in a trade, that is not your fault and it is not your job to fix: there is no agentic booking partner for trades, nobody has announced one, and that will stay true for a while. For you a pass is that it found you, it could state your price shape, and it handed the buyer a way to reach you. Run it again in a month and the earlier stalls should have moved.

Then the next service

So: a price with a shape, a path that answers, a page that owns the service, proof someone else vouches for, and one identity that agrees with itself. Five things, one service, a fortnight. Those five installs are the five signals from The Recommendation turned into jobs. Install three carries two of them at once, the page that owns the service and the real-question content that fills it, and install four is the machine-legible half of one verified identity. Then the next service. It goes faster, because the identity work is done and you now know what a pass looks like.

Or get the whole surface scored at once. The Visibility read grades the five signals an agent reads across the whole business, out of 75, and names the first thing to fix. Either way the order holds: one service, five installs, and a machine test that tells you which of them you got wrong.

How to make one service agent-ready

Questions