For the last two decades, we’ve had two core disciplines in web optimisation: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).

I’ve spent my career at the intersection of both. For a long time, I argued that technical SEO and CRO were two sides of the same coin. One speaks to machines (Googlebot), the other to humans, but both aim to make a website better and more profitable. There were subtle differences, but their goals were deeply aligned.

Today, that coin has a third side. A new discipline is emerging, born from the DNA of its predecessors, and it’s about to become the most important conversation in web optimisation.

This is the new era.

This Isn't Another Mobile-First Moment. It's Bigger.

A little over a decade ago, the entire industry scrambled to adapt to the mobile web. "Mobile-first" became the mantra. We redesigned everything for smaller screens, touch inputs, and slower connections. It was a massive shift, but it came with one comforting constant: the user was the same. We were still designing for a human, just in a different context.

This time is different. The user is different.

The next wave of traffic, and more importantly, transactions, won't be driven by a human with a thumb and a screen. It will be driven by autonomous AI agents. These are not just crawlers indexing content for search; they are goal-oriented "virtual visitors" tasked by humans to perform complex actions: book a flight, compare insurance policies, buy a product, or schedule an appointment.

This is a far more complex and fundamental shift. We’re no longer just changing the layout for a different screen size. We are engineering a digital environment for an entirely new, non-human user.

The Birth of Agent Experience Optimization (AXO)

So, how do we optimise for this new user? This is where our two old friends, technical SEO and CRO, come together. This new discipline is like their baby, and it’s called Agent Experience Optimization (AXO).

• It has the soul of Technical SEO: An AI agent, much like Googlebot, needs to understand your website on a structural level. It doesn't care about your beautiful hero image or clever headline copy. It cares about clean, logical, machine-readable code. This is the world of semantic HTML (<article>, <nav>, <section>), comprehensive structured data (Schema.org), and accessibility standards (ARIA) that give unambiguous meaning to your content. Without this solid technical foundation, to an agent, your website is just a wall of meaningless noise.

• It has the mind of CRO: An agent isn't just browsing, it has a job to do. It has a conversion goal. It needs to navigate a workflow successfully and efficiently. Just as a CRO specialist obsesses over removing friction for human users, things like confusing forms, inconsistent navigation, unexpected pop-ups, an AXO specialist must do the same for agents. If an agent fails a task on your site because it can't find the "submit" button or gets stuck on a CAPTCHA, that's a lost conversion.

AXO is the practice of making your website not just machine-readable, but fully agent-operable. It’s the art and science of ensuring an AI can achieve its goal on your site with the highest possible success rate and the lowest possible cost, without needing a human to intervene.

Let's Be Clear: This Isn't the Death of SEO (or CRO)

It's tempting to see a new acronym and declare the old ones obsolete. Let's be clear: AXO is not a replacement for SEO or CRO. It's an evolution and a new, necessary layer.

Think of it this way:

• SEO is still the foundation. It helps you get found by search engines (all of them, including the AI-based ones) and remains the core of digital marketing.
• CRO is still critical. It helps you convert the humans who arrive on your site.
• AXO is the next step. It helps your website get used by the autonomous agents acting on behalf of those humans.

SEO itself is already evolving into what some call Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), which focuses on making content easily digestible for AI-driven summaries and voice assistants. AXO builds on these principles but goes further, shifting the goal from simply being understood to being fully operable. The fundamentals of good technical SEO: clean code, fast load times, logical structure are more important than ever, as they form the bedrock upon which a great Agent Experience is built.

Welcome to the "No Hacks Era"

For years, optimisation has been littered with short-term tactics and clever "hacks" designed to game an algorithm or nudge human psychology. Those days are numbered.

We are entering the "No Hacks Era" of web optimisation.

AI agents are logical. They are process-driven. They cannot be persuaded by urgency-inducing countdown timers or social proof widgets if the underlying structure is broken. They demand a return to fundamentals.

Success in this new era won't come from growth hacks. It will come from a deep commitment to building a digital asset that is:

• Structured: With a logical and semantic information architecture.
• Predictable: With consistent navigation and UI patterns.
• Actionable: With clear, machine-readable interactive elements.
• Accessible: Both for humans with disabilities and for the AI agents that learn from the same accessibility principles.

This isn't just about appeasing a new kind of bot. It's about building a more robust, resilient, and valuable website for the long term. The good news is that the work you do to make your site better for agents almost always makes it better for humans, too.

A new type of user is here. The question is, is your website ready for them?