Agent Experience Guide

The web was built for humans. Every button, form, and navigation menu assumes a person with eyes and hands. But the fastest-growing user base isn't human — it's AI agents. Every website already has an agent experience. The question is whether it's good or bad.

Just as UX taught us to design for users, and DX taught us to design for developers, AX (Agent Experience) is the discipline of designing for AI agents — software that browses sites, calls APIs, reads docs, and completes tasks on behalf of people. This guide is a practical, open-source handbook on how to do it well.

Why This Guide Exists

• ora.ai tells you where you stand — it scores and ranks agent readiness across thousands of sites.
• axd.md tells you what to aim for — it defines 12 principles and 15 primitives of agent experience design.
• agentexperience.ax curates conversations and articles about the AX movement.

This guide tells you how to get there — concrete, actionable steps with code examples, patterns, and anti-patterns.

The Six Stages

1. Discovery — Can agents find you?
2. Identity — Do agents understand what you do?
3. Auth & Access — Can agents authenticate and act?
4. Integration — Is the plumbing there?
5. Errors & Recovery — Can agents self-heal?
6. End-User Experience — Can humans interact through agents?

Quick Start

1. Add /llms.txt to your site root describing what your site does.
2. Return typed errors with retry guidance from every API endpoint.
3. Let agents authenticate with scoped API tokens instead of browser-only OAuth.

→ Start reading