A new acronym has landed: AXO, agent experience optimisation. It sits alongside AEO and GEO in the roundups, it has dedicated sites building out playbooks and glossaries, and agencies have started selling it as a service.
The working definition is: structuring and presenting web content so that LLM agents can crawl, understand, archive and reference it in their responses.
That is a good definition. Readable structure, unambiguous claims, machine-legible meaning, reliable availability — every one of those principles is right. My only argument with it is the scope. It describes one layer of agent experience and takes the name for the whole thing.
Swap "website" for "product" and every principle survives
Take the AXO playbook and apply it to a JSON schema instead of a landing page.
Readable structure becomes tool names and parameters an agent can parse without guessing. Unambiguous statements becomes a description that says which tool to use and, crucially, when not to. Machine-legible meaning becomes typed enums rather than free-text fields. Reliable availability becomes a contract that doesn't change shape underneath a running session.
Nothing breaks in translation. If anything the principles bind harder, because an agent reading your web page can skim, infer from surrounding context, and recover from a bad paragraph. An agent calling your tool gets one shot at a schema it has never seen, cannot ask a question about, and will be silently penalised for misreading.
So AXO has two layers:
- The content layer — your site, docs and structured data, so agents can find you, understand you and cite you. This is where the current AXO writing lives, and it overlaps heavily with AEO and GEO.
- The product layer — your tool contracts, schemas, responses and errors, so that an agent that has already found you can actually finish the job.
Same discipline. Different artifact, different team, different metric.
The layers fail independently, and the second one is where the money is
This is not an academic distinction, because a company can be excellent at one layer and hopeless at the other. Most are.
Win the content layer alone and you get recommended. An assistant tells someone your product is the right tool for their job, the user connects it, the agent makes its first call — and gets a validation error on a field your description never mentioned. Teng Li's scan of 36 popular MCP servers found about a third failing their agents, with description scores of zero on almost every failing server; one popular server accounted for 132 of its 134 errors through undocumented parameters alone. These are not obscure projects. They are servers people are actively recommending.
The cost of that failure is not neutral. The agent doesn't file a bug. It moves on, and the user hears that the thing didn't work.
Win the product layer alone and you are invisible but excellent — which is a better problem, and a solvable one, but still a problem.
The two also compound in one direction only. Content work gets you considered once. Product work gets you used repeatedly, and on marketplaces that rank by usage, repeated use is what buys distribution. Citations are a flow; a working contract is a stock.
Naming the layer you mean
None of this requires anyone to give up the acronym. It requires saying which layer you are working on, because the roles don't transfer: the content layer is won by a marketing team and measured in share of voice, the product layer is won by an engineering team and measured in task completion. A team that hears "we need to do AXO" and staffs it with only one of those has bought half a strategy without knowing it.
If you are structuring content so agents can cite you, that is the content layer, and the existing AXO writing is genuinely useful — go and read it. If you are shipping an MCP server, a Claude Connector or a ChatGPT App, you are on the product layer, and almost none of the published AXO advice is about you yet.
That second half is the one we work on. It is also, on current evidence, the half more people are getting wrong.
Sources
- What is Agent Experience Optimization (AXO)? — the prevailing content-layer definition
- SEO, AEO, GEO, AXO, AIO: what do the new acronyms mean? — where AXO sits in the current acronym landscape
- I lint-scanned 36 popular MCP servers. A third of them are failing your agent. — Teng Li, July 2026 (a third graded D/F; 132 of 134 errors from undocumented parameters on one server)
- Writing effective tools for AI agents — Anthropic, on the tool contract as the thing the model actually reads
If you build a surface that agents use, and you want to know how they actually use it, Vesta is in early access.