--- source_url: "https://www.42a.ai/agent-acquisition/" title: "Agent Acquisition — Is Your Site Ready for the New Buyer? | 42A" mirrored_at: 2026-08-15T01:35:42.861Z host: www.42a.ai cited_in_42a: true mirror_canonical: "https://index.42a.ai/www.42a.ai/agent-acquisition/index" --- > **Original source:** https://www.42a.ai/agent-acquisition/ New Agent Acquisition ## User acquisition is over. _Agent acquisition_ is the game. There’s a new buyer in town — and it isn’t human. AI agents now research, shortlist and transact on behalf of your customers. They never see your ads or your homepage; they read your machine-readable surface and decide in one shot. **Acquiring agents is a different game. We wrote the playbook.** [See the Playbook](#playbook) Across ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini · Perplexity 01 — A New Buyer ## You spent a decade on user acquisition. _The next decade is agent acquisition._ The buyer A human you persuade with ads, copy and design. An autonomous agent that reads your machine surface and decides. The channel Search, social, email — paid and earned attention. Retrieval, tool calls and structured data the model can parse. What wins Brand, creative, funnel and conversion-rate optimization. Clean schema, readable policies, working endpoints, agentic checkout. The moment A click, then a session you can retarget. A single decision. No visit, no second chance — chosen or skipped. 02 — Is Your Site Ready? ## Four questions an agent asks _before it picks anyone._ 01 ### Can an agent find you? Citations, structured data, llms.txt and the third-party content agents actually retrieve when your category comes up. 02 ### Can it understand what you sell? Product and capability schema with the technical attributes agents filter on — not marketing copy buried in HTML. 03 ### Can it act without a human? An MCP server or API with scoped auth, typed errors and idempotency — so the agent can complete, not abandon. 04 ### Can it transact? Agentic checkout and machine-readable policies (ACP, UCP, AP2) so the purchase or signup finishes inside the chat. If you can’t answer all four with a confident yes, agents are already choosing someone else. 03 — Why Now ## The rails are live. _The buyers are already agents._ Live Agentic commerce ChatGPT Instant Checkout, Stripe ACP, Google’s UCP and AP2 are in production. Agents can complete a purchase without ever loading your site. Standard Model Context Protocol MCP went from spec to industry standard in roughly a year — the way agents now plug into the products they act on. Aug ’26 Compliance deadline EU AI Act enforcement begins. Being agent-ready increasingly means being audit-ready, too. 04 — The Funnel ## Five stages. _Win every one._ Agent acquisition has its own funnel. We instrument every stage, find exactly where agents drop you, and fix it in order of revenue impact. 01 ### Discover The agent learns you exist — and retrieves you when your category comes up. 02 ### Consider You make the shortlist against everyone else the agent pulled in. 03 ### Decide The agent commits to you over the alternatives it was weighing. 04 ### Complete The agent finishes the integration, signup or checkout without giving up. 05 ### Return It chooses you again — across new prompts and new model versions. This is the engine behind [ADO — Agentic Decision Optimization](https://www.42a.ai/ado/). Agent acquisition is the outcome; ADO is how we get you there. Agent-readiness audit — limited slots per quarter ## Be the brand agents _acquire._ We’ll show you exactly where agents drop you — and the fix list to win them back.