Launching Agent Experience Design (AXD)

Your next visitor may not be a person

For twenty years, digital experience has been designed around one audience: a human with a browser. Every navigation decision, every form, every campaign landing page assumed someone was looking at a screen and clicking through it.

That assumption no longer holds on its own. Customers now ask AI assistants to research products, compare providers, summarise policies and, increasingly, complete tasks for them. The assistant visits the website, reads what it can, and reports back. Sometimes it books, buys or submits on the customer's behalf.

When that happens, the agent is the visitor. If it can't understand your site, your customer never sees it. That is why we launched Agent Experience Design (AXD) at GammaDX.

What agents need that most websites don't provide

Agents don't experience a website the way people do. They don't notice a hero image or respond to a clever headline. They parse structure, read content literally and try to work out what actions are available. Where a person fills gaps with intuition, an agent stalls or guesses.

In our work across enterprise Sitecore and Optimizely platforms, we see the same barriers come up repeatedly:

• Key information locked inside images, PDFs, carousels or client-side scripts that agents struggle to read
• Thin or missing structured data, so products, services, locations and pricing aren't clearly defined
• Navigation and information architecture built for browsing rather than for answering specific questions
• Forms and transactional journeys that depend on visual cues, multi-step interactions or bot protection that blocks legitimate agents
• Inconsistent content across pages, which leads AI assistants to give customers incomplete or wrong answers

None of these problems are new. Many also hurt accessibility and search performance. What has changed is the cost of ignoring them. A site that confuses an agent is now invisible at the exact moment a customer is making a decision.

What Agent Experience Design is

AXD is the practice of designing digital experiences that AI agents can find, understand and act on, without compromising the experience for people. It sits alongside UX, not in place of it. The goal is one platform that serves both audiences well.

Our approach covers five areas:

• Agent readiness audits. We assess how agents currently read and interpret your site, and where they fail.
• Structured content and schema. We model content so that products, services, people and policies are explicit and machine-readable.
• Information architecture for answers. We organise content around the questions customers and their agents are actually asking.
• Agent-friendly actions. We review forms, transactions and APIs so legitimate agents can complete tasks reliably and securely.
• LLM visibility. We track how your brand appears in AI-generated answers and close the gaps.

Because most of this work happens in the CMS and content model, it fits naturally into the Sitecore and Optimizely platforms we already build and support. For many organisations, AXD improvements can be delivered as part of an existing roadmap rather than a separate program.

Why now, and why us

The shift to agent-led discovery is happening faster than most digital roadmaps are being updated. Organisations that prepare now will shape how AI assistants describe and recommend them. Those that wait will be retrofitting under pressure, after competitors have already become the default answer.

AXD isn't a layer you add on top of a website. It depends on the content model, the platform configuration and the way teams publish every day. We work at all three levels.

We also believe AXD should be measured, not just discussed. That led us to build a benchmark.

Introducing the Gamma AXD Index

The Gamma AXD Index benchmarks how agent-ready websites are. Our scanner assesses a site against the factors that determine whether an AI agent can find, understand and act on its content, then scores it so you can see where you stand.

The Index gives marketing, digital and technology teams a shared baseline. It shows what is working, where agents are likely to struggle and which fixes will have the most impact. It also lets you track progress over time as your site and the agent landscape evolve.

AI agents are already visiting your website. The question is what they see.

Check your score on the Gamma AXD Index, then talk to us about what comes next.