Agent SEO field notes
How AI agents pick developer tools — what Pick Rate measures, where citations mislead, and how to get chosen. Backed by live Pickrate data.
Serve Both: /index.md and Accept: text/markdown
Content negotiation is the correct way to serve markdown to agents. It is also the one most agents don't use. Cloudflare tested seven; three sent the header. Here's why you need the ugly URL fallback too, and why that stays true no matter how good the new discovery standards get.
We Scored 124 Dev Tools on Agent Readiness. It Barely Predicts Who Agents Pick.
We ran Cloudflare's Agent Readiness score against every tool on the Pickrate leaderboards, then joined it to measured Pick Rate. The correlation is 0.19. Stripe scores 4 out of 16 and wins 80% of payments trials. Telnyx scores 14 out of 16 and wins nothing.
Why Your Analytics Can’t See AI Agents
Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom, Vercel Analytics — all of them are blind to AI agent traffic, and not by accident. Agents don’t run JavaScript, so the tag never fires. Here’s the mechanism, what you’re missing, and how to actually see it.
Your SaaS Has a Billboard. The Agent Can’t Read It.
Our first SaaS leaderboard — work management — finds the household names nearly invisible to AI agents. Linear leads, Jira is named-but-not-picked, and the tools with the biggest marketing barely register. As SaaS goes headless, the selection criteria flip.
An Agent Sent You a Customer. Your Analytics Called It “Direct.”
AI agents are quietly driving signups your analytics files under “direct.” Why agent attribution is structurally hard, which parts are actually measurable, and why anyone promising perfect AI attribution is overselling.
We Measure Whether Agents Pick Tools. Now They Can Pick Pickrate.
Pickrate is now WebMCP-native: open it in Chrome and an in-browser AI agent can call its tools directly. Why being callable, not just recommended, is the next stage of Agent SEO.
Your Coding Agent Can Now Ask Pickrate Which Tool to Pick
Pickrate is now a remote MCP server. Add one line to Cursor or Claude Desktop and your agent can query any tool's Pick Rate, mid-task. Why being callable is the whole point.
What Is Pick Rate? Measuring Whether AI Agents Choose Your Tool
Pick Rate is the share of the time an AI agent picks your tool over competitors on a real task. Here's what it measures, why citations aren't the same thing, and how to read it.
Mintlify Is Hot With Humans. AI Agents Barely Pick It.
We measured which documentation platforms AI agents recommend. The buzzy hosted names lose to old open-source frameworks — a textbook case of the corpus-presence gap.
Agent SEO: How to Get Recommended by AI Coding Agents
Agent SEO is the discipline of getting AI coding agents to pick your tool. A practical checklist across the four stages agents move through before they choose you.
Why AI Agents Aren't Picking Your SDK (and How to Fix It)
If agents know your SDK exists but never import it, the problem is usually Discovery, not awareness. The Probe/Serve gap, llms.txt, OpenAPI, MCP, and unbranded prompts.
GEO vs. Agent Selection: Citations Aren't the Same as Getting Picked
GEO and brand-radar tools measure whether AI talks about you. Agent selection measures whether AI chooses you. Why the distinction decides what you optimize.
The Agent Funnel: The Four Observable Stages of Being Chosen by AI
Awareness, Discovery, Recommendation, Adoption. The four stages an AI agent moves through before it picks your tool — and how to find the one that's capping you.
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