The last few weeks have been noisy. Google shipped something called the Open Knowledge Format. Then Google Developers announced the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification.
Meanwhile, every SEO LinkedIn feed is lit up with someone either declaring markdown the future of the web or explaining why you should ignore all of it.
The truth, as per usual, sits somewhere more interesting than either camp.
The web is developing a parallel machine-readable infrastructure (MCP/WebMCP, OKF, ARD, LLMs.txt…) and SEOs who understand what each layer actually does, rather than treating it all as “AI SEO” or a silver bullet, will make better decisions about where to spend their time.
First: The Layer Cake
There are at least six distinct things being discussed under the umbrella of “making your site AI-ready.” They sit at different layers and serve different purposes:
- Crawlable HTML Pages: Still the foundation. Nothing has changed here. Everything else sits on top.
- Schema.org/Structured Data: Semantic hints baked into HTML that tell machines explicitly what a page is about. It is, in essence, a vocabulary.
- LLMs.txt: Essentially a navigation file. Its purpose is to essentially tell an AI agent that’s already on your site which pages matter. But as John Mueller puts it on the Search Off the Record podcast:
“If someone is already on your website, maybe some kind of automated system is helpful. Where if it goes, I want to go to Martin’s Splitt and buy a photograph, then the LLM system can go to your website and can look around, like, how do you buy a photograph? Maybe he has some guidelines for me as an agent for buying photographs. That kind of makes sense.”
- MCP/WebMCP: Before ARD came into play, we were presented with another solution for the challenge of interoperability. An MCP, in its simplest explanation, is a standardized way for an AI to connect to your services to extract knowledge or take action. WebMCP, as the name itself suggests, gives websites a way to engage with agents directly. WebMCP is for live browser interactions on a webpage; MCP is for tools and services beyond the page.
- Open Knowledge Format (OKF): A bundle of markdown files with YAML frontmatter.
- Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD): A new open spec for how agents find and verify tools, skills, and other agents across the web. Here, the focus is not your content; it’s your capabilities.
For ecommerce, there’s another layer worth naming separately – the product feed – quite possibly the future of retail discovery.
Each layer does something different.
I could keep adding to this list; there’s a new layer popping up every five minutes. I’m stopping here. It’s ballooning.
What OKF Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Google published the OKF spec quietly, bolted to a rebrand of Dataplex into Knowledge Catalog.
The format itself is almost disarmingly simple: a directory of markdown files, each with a small YAML header declaring a type, title, description, resource, and…
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