A growing share of buying now starts inside an AI assistant. The buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to find and compare options, and an agent does the legwork — arriving at your site already half-decided, or never arriving at all. The uncomfortable truth is that you're being filtered out before a human ever sees you, and you can't see it happening.
So how does an agent actually choose? Cutting through the noise, four factors decide it — and the funnel narrows fast.
1. Can it read what you do, fast. Agents don't browse; they parse. If your offering, who it's for, and your pricing aren't in machine-readable text — structured data, a clear /llms.txt, plain prose rather than JS-rendered visuals — you're illegible. And illegible means skipped.
2. Can it assess fit. This is where it dies quietest. If pricing sits behind a “contact sales” wall, or your specs and terms aren't stated, the agent can't judge budget or fit — so it recommends a competitor who made it easy.
3. Citation history. Increasingly, agents weight sources that have been consistently referenced over time over a freshly-optimised page. Authority compounds — which is exactly why publishing genuinely useful content now, rather than later, matters.
4. Can it finish the job. Discoverability gets you shortlisted; completability wins the deal. If the next step — buy, book a demo, start a trial — needs a human, the agent abandons at the last step.
Most readiness advice stops at #1. But being found is table stakes; the deals are lost at #2 and #4 — the stages you've never been able to measure. That's the gap Actum closes: we send an autonomous AI buyer through your live site, show you the exact stage it drops out, and keep you transactable as the models and standards keep moving.