Head Of WordPress AI Team Explains SEO For AI Agents

James LePage, Director Engineering AI at Automattic, and the co-lead of the WordPress AI Team, shared his insights into things publishers should be thinking about in terms of SEO. He’s the founder and co-lead of the WordPress Core AI Team, which is tasked with coordinating AI-related projects within WordPress, including how AI agents will interact within the WordPress ecosystem. He shared insights into what’s coming to the web in the context of AI agents and some of the implications for SEO.

AI Agents And Infrastructure

The first observation that he made was that AI agents will use the same web infrastructure as search engines. The main point he makes is that the data that the agents are using comes from the regular classic search indexes.

He writes, somewhat provocatively:

“Agents will use the same infrastructure the web already has.

• Search to discover relevant entities.
• “Domain authority” and trust signals to evaluate sources.
• Links to traverse between entities.
• Content to understand what each entity offers.

I find it interesting how much money is flowing into AIO and GEO startups when the underlying way agents retrieve information is by using existing search indexes. ChatGPT uses Bing. Anthropic uses Brave. Google uses Google. The mechanics of the web don’t change. What changes is who’s doing the traversing.”

AI SEO = Longtail Optimization

LePage also said that schema structured data, semantic density, and interlinking between pages is essential for optimizing for AI agents. Notable is that he said that AI optimization that AIO and GEO companies are doing is just basic longtail query optimization.

He explained:

“AI intermediaries doing synthesis need structured, accessible content. Clear schemas, semantic density, good interlinking. This is the challenge most publishers are grappling with now. In fact there’s a bit of FUD in this industry. Billions of dollars flowing into AIO and GEO when much of what AI optimization really is is simply long-tail keyword search optimization.”

What Optimized Content Looks Like For AI Agents

LePage, who is involved in AI within the WordPress ecosystem, said that content should be organized in an “intentional” manner for agent consumption, by which he means structured markdown, semantic markup, and content that’s easy to understand.

A little further he explains what he believes content should look like for AI agent consumption:

“Presentations of content that prioritize what matters most. Rankings that signal which information is authoritative versus supplementary. Representations that progressively disclose detail, giving agents the summary first with clear paths to depth. All of this still static, not conversational, not dynamic, but shaped with agent traversal in mind.

Think of it as the difference between a pile of documents and a well-organized briefing. Both contain the same information. One is far more useful to someone trying to quickly understand what you offer.”

A little later in the article he offers a seemingly contradictory prediction of the role of content in an agentic AI future, reversing today’s formula of a well organized briefing over a pile of documents, saying that agentic AI will not need a website, just the content, a pile of documents.

Nevertheless, he recommends that content have structure so that the information is well organized at the page level with clear hierarchical structure and at the site level as well where interlinking makes the relationships between documents clearer. He emphasizes that the content must communicate what it’s for.

He then adds that in the future websites will have AI agents that communicate with external AI agents, which gets into the paradigm he mentioned of content being split off from the website so that the data can be displayed in ways that make sense for a user, completely separated from today’s concept of visiting a website.

He writes:

“Think of this as a progression. What exists now is essentially Perplexity-style web search with more steps: gather content, generate synthesis, present to user. The user still makes decisions and takes actions. Near-term, users delegate specific tasks with explicit specifications, and agents can take actions like purchases or bookings within bounded authority. Further out, agents operate more autonomously based on standing guidelines, becoming something closer to economic actors in their own right.

The progression is toward more autonomy, but that doesn’t mean humans disappear from the loop. It means the loop gets wider. Instead of approving every action, users set guidelines and review outcomes.

…Before full site delegates exist, there’s a middle ground that matters right now.

The content an agent has access to can be presented in a way that makes sense for how agents work today. Currently, that means structured markdown, clean semantic markup, content that’s easy to parse and understand. But even within static content, there’s room to be intentional about how information is organized for agent consumption.”

His article, titled Agents & The New Internet (3/5), provides useful ideas of how to prepare for the agentic AI future.

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