How to Optimize for Agentic Search with Semrush

To optimize for agentic search with Semrush, make sure AI agents can reach, understand, trust, and act on your site. Run Site Audit’s AI Search Health check, fix content clarity, track mentions in the AI Visibility Toolkit, clean up forms and buttons, then monitor AI traffic and bot activity monthly in GA4 and Log File Analyzer.

What is agentic search?

Agentic search is when an AI agent does the searching for a person: it runs its own queries, reads multiple sites, compares options, and can complete tasks such as booking or buying. The person states a goal; the agent works out the steps.

Think of it as a range. At one end, ChatGPT or Perplexity looks up sources and writes an answer. On the other, an agent shortlists three HVAC companies, checks their hours and reviews, and fills out a quote form for the best fit.

Don’t confuse this with “agentic SEO”, which is marketers using AI agents to do SEO work. This guide is about the visitor side: getting your business found, picked, and used by agents acting for your customers.

Why agentic search matters for your business

Agents are a new kind of website visitor. They don’t scroll or admire your design. They read your HTML and accessibility tree, look at screenshots, and try to complete a goal. If they hit a dead end, they move on to a competitor.

Google now treats this as part of SEO. Its guide to optimizing for generative AI features includes a section on agentic experiences, noting that browser agents may inspect your DOM and accessibility tree to complete tasks. The same guide says AEO and GEO are, from Google’s view, still SEO.

There’s money behind the shift too. Semrush’s own research, cited in its agentic web guide, shows that the average AI search visitor has 4.4 times the conversion value of a traditional organic visitor. Treat that as vendor data until your own GA4 numbers confirm it.

If you’ve already worked on optimizing for Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, most of that work carries over. Agentic search adds two jobs on top: being trusted enough to make a shortlist, and being usable enough for an agent to act.

Agentic search vs AI search vs classic SEO

How to optimize for agentic search with Semrush: 6 steps

Work from the bottom up. An agent-ready signup form is useless if the agent can’t load the page.

1. Check that AI agents can reach your site

Run a Site Audit project in Semrush and open the overview. Two widgets matter here. AI Search Health scores how ready your site is for AI search. Blocked from AI Search shows which pages your robots.txt blocks from major AI crawlers, such as ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, and Google-Extended.

Decide on each bot deliberately. Some collect training data; others fetch pages live when a user asks a question. Blocking live-fetch bots means agents can’t read you at the moment a buyer asks. Blocking training bots is a separate business call.

Then clear the usual blockers in the Issues report:

• Key content that only appears after JavaScript runs (turn on JavaScript rendering in your crawl settings if your plan allows it)
• 5xx errors, redirect loops, and broken internal links
• Slow pages that time out before the content loads

Semrush’s own guide sends this step to Enterprise Site Intelligence. You don’t need Enterprise. Standard Site Audit covers it for most small and mid-sized sites.

2. Make your key facts easy to extract

Agents compare facts across sites, so vague copy loses. Use Semrush’s Prompt Research to see the questions people ask AI tools in your category. Then make sure the answers sit on your pages as plain text, not inside images or PDFs.

For a service business, that means service area, starting prices or price ranges, hours, response times, licenses, and what’s included. Put each in a clearly headed section. Add an FAQ that uses your buyers’ wording.

Keep schema in perspective. Google says structured data isn’t required for its AI features, and there’s no special markup for them. Organization, LocalBusiness, and Product schema still help machines confirm who you are, so keep them accurate. Google also says you don’t need to chop content into tiny chunks for AI. Write clear sections, and both people and agents will follow them.

3. Build trust signals agents can verify

Agents check what others say about you before they shortlist you. Start with the AI Visibility Toolkit’s Competitor Research: enter your domain and up to four competitors to compare visibility scores, mentions, and the prompts where rivals appear and you don’t.

Next, open the Brand Monitoring app to find where you’re mentioned and whether the details match. If your site says you serve Delaware and your directory listings say Pennsylvania, an agent can’t tell which is right. Fix the mismatches at the source.

Then grow real proof: reviews on the platforms your buyers use, an up-to-date Google Business Profile, and mentions from trade sites and local press. Skip shortcuts. Google warns that chasing inauthentic mentions doesn’t help in its AI features. This is the same work as building E-E-A-T trust signals.

4. Make your forms and buttons work for agents

This is where most small business sites fail, and Semrush can’t fully test it for you. Site Audit checks crawlability, not whether an agent can finish your quote form. Use Google’s agent-friendly website checklist on web.dev and fix these:

• Real buttons and links. Use <button> and <a>, not styled <div> elements. If you must use a div, give it a role and tabindex.
• Labeled fields. Link every <label> to its input with the for attribute, so the agent knows what “Field 3” wants.
• No hidden overlays. Transparent layers over buttons can make an agent skip them. Keep pop-ups off quote, booking, and checkout pages.
• Stable layouts. Keep your main call-to-action in the same place across pages, and make clickable elements a sensible size.
• Specific labels. “Get a quote” or “Book an inspection” tells an agent what happens next. “Learn more” doesn’t.

To test, open Chrome DevTools and view the accessibility tree for your contact page. If your submit button shows up as a generic element with no name, an agent will struggle too. Then ask a browsing AI agent, such as ChatGPT’s agent mode or Perplexity Comet, to request a quote on your site, and watch where it gets stuck. These fixes also tend to help human visitors, which is why they belong on any list of must-have features for business websites.

5. Decide which agentic protocols apply to you

Protocols give agents a direct, structured way to act on your site, rather than clicking through it as a person would. They’re early, and most aren’t relevant to most businesses yet.

Semrush covers protocols as a planning step; it won’t audit your implementation. If you sell online, ask your platform (Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce) what it supports before building anything custom.

6. Measure what agents do with your brand

Track two kinds of numbers each month.

Visibility (are agents finding and recommending you?): the AI Visibility Toolkit’s visibility score and mentions by model, plus citations in Prompt Tracking. Its Citation Gap report shows prompts where competitors are cited, but you aren’t. Those are your next content priorities.

Activity (is that turning into visits and leads?): upload server logs to Semrush’s Log File Analyzer to see which AI bots hit your site and how often. In GA4, report AI-referred sessions and conversions; the default channel group now has an AI Assistant row for traffic from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Be honest about the gap. No analytics tool, Semrush included, shows exactly what an agent did on your site yet. Bot logs plus AI referrals are the closest proxy.

Do you need an llms.txt file?

Probably not as a priority. Semrush’s AI Search Health score counts llms.txt as part of technical readiness, so missing it can lower your score. But Google’s guide says plainly that Google Search ignores llms.txt and similar AI text files, and that adding one neither helps nor hurts your Google visibility.

Our take: don’t chase the score. If your developer can add a simple llms.txt in a few minutes for other AI services, fine. Spend real effort on steps 1 to 4, which help every agent and every search engine.

Who can skip the protocol work for now?

If you run a local service business, such as roofing, HVAC, a law firm, or a moving company, steps 1 to 4 and 6 cover nearly all of the value today. Agents researching local services read your pages, reviews, and Business Profile, then send the user to call or fill out a form. Protocols matter more for ecommerce and software companies, where the agent can finish the purchase itself.

How Agreed Technologies gets sites agent-ready

At Agreed Technologies, our SEO work centers on answer engine optimization, and Semrush is part of our daily tool stack alongside Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and GA4. We run the Site Audit and AI Visibility checks above as part of client reporting, focused on leads rather than vanity numbers.

Because we also build websites, we can fix the action layer, not just report on it. Our web design and development team works across WordPress, Shopify, and custom builds, so labeled forms, real buttons, and stable layouts get shipped instead of sitting in an audit. For example, Agreed Technologies helped a U.S.-based Texas local coffee supplier move from page 3 to a top-3 local-pack ranking in just four months.

For the bigger picture on where search is heading, see why AI-driven SEO matters in 2026.

Next step: call +1 (425) 216-6843, email contact@agreedtechnologies.com, or use our contact page. We’re headquartered in Newark, DE, with a team in Noida, India, and work with businesses across the US.

Want to know whether AI agents can find and use your site? Book a strategy call, and we’ll run the checks with you.