# Agentic search

Agentic search is the step past answering: an AI system that browses, acts and transacts on a user's behalf rather than returning an answer for the user to act on. It reads a site as an agent, not a reader, which makes machine readability, actionability and access policy the optimization surface.

The record shows the capability arriving across every major engine at once. Google says Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is rolling out in Search to power agentic search experiences; Gemini Spark's Chrome integration uses saved passwords and logged-in accounts to research and begin bookings — flights, apartment viewings — before handing payment steps back to the user, now in more than 160 additional countries but not the EEA, UK, Switzerland or Nigeria. Perplexity ships an agentic browser, Comet. OpenAI is testing a ChatGPT ad format where the click opens a Business Agent conversation instead of the advertiser's website.

The publishing side has a vocabulary forming around it. A July 2026 arXiv paper proposes three design principles for agent-ready websites — machine readability, actionability, decision reliability. Time has converted pages to stripped-down markdown so agents can read them, and sells ads inside those pages. Cloudflare's Agent Readiness tool audits the same territory: robots.txt and sitemap rules, content machine-readability, and agent-callable APIs.

Access is the unresolved half. IAB Australia's crawler matrix treats live AI agents as their own category, subject to the same four verdicts as any other crawler — allow, allow with conditions, require licensing, or block. And the Ninth Circuit has given the question its first appellate test, reversing an injunction that barred Comet from Amazon.com on the ground that the user, not Perplexity, directs the Assistant's access.

**What is agentic search?** An AI system that browses, acts and transacts on a user's behalf rather than returning an answer the user acts on — reading sites as an agent rather than as a reader.

**What makes a website agent-ready?** A 2026 arXiv paper proposes three design principles: machine readability, actionability, and decision reliability. Cloudflare's Agent Readiness tool audits the same ground — robots.txt and sitemap rules, content machine-readability, and agent-callable APIs.

**Are AI shopping agents allowed to use my site?** Unsettled. The Ninth Circuit reversed an injunction barring Perplexity's Comet browser from Amazon.com, holding the user directs the Assistant's access, so Perplexity is unlikely to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. IAB Australia's guidance sorts live AI agents into allow, allow with conditions, require licensing, or block.

Canonical: https://anythingengineoptimization.com/glossary/agentic-search/
From the Anything Engine Optimization glossary — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/glossary/