How to Test Your Site With an AI Agent
Visibility in AI answers gets you into the conversation. What happens next, when an AI agent actually tries to use your site on a buyer's behalf, is a separate question, and it's the one CiteCue's Agent Usability answers. This tutorial walks through running a test and acting on what it finds.
Step 1: Confirm you're on a plan that includes it
Agent Usability is available on the Agency plan, with 12 runs a month included. If you're on Free or Pro, this is one of the modules that unlocks when you upgrade, worth knowing before you go looking for it in the sidebar.
Step 2: Have a project with AI Context set up
Agent Usability works best once your project's AI Context is filled in. CiteCue auto-fills it from your site when you create the project, and you can edit it any time. It gives the agent a starting sense of what your site sells and who it's for, much as a real buyer would arrive with some context already. If you haven't set up a project yet, start with the setup walkthrough for tracking your brand in AI answers.
Step 3: Run an Agent Usability test
From the Agent Usability page, start a run. This isn't a crawl or a technical scan. CiteCue sends an actual AI agent to attempt real tasks on your site the way a buyer using an AI assistant would: find your pricing, get in touch, figure out what you actually sell. The agent navigates your site on its own, the same way a growing number of real AI-assisted shoppers and researchers do.
Step 4: Read the task-level report
When the run finishes, the report is broken down task by task rather than one pass/fail score for your whole site. For each task, you can see what the agent tried, whether it succeeded, and if it didn't, the exact point where it got stuck or gave up. That specificity is what makes the report useful. "Your site scored 60%" tells you almost nothing actionable, but "the agent couldn't find a pricing link from the homepage and gave up after three attempts" tells you precisely what to fix.
Step 5: Fix what's blocking the agent
Common failure points tend to be structural rather than exotic: pricing information buried behind a "contact us" form with no visible numbers, a contact path that requires a login, key facts that live in an image instead of text, or navigation that depends on JavaScript interactions an agent doesn't reliably trigger. Some of these overlap with the crawler-level issues AI Readiness checks for, and since the report tells you exactly which task failed and where, the fix is usually a targeted change to one page or one flow rather than a site-wide overhaul.
Step 6: Re-run to confirm it worked
After you've made a fix, run Agent Usability again and check the same task. Each run reports at the task level, so you can confirm whether the specific thing you fixed now succeeds, instead of relying on a general sense that things "should" be better.
Why this is worth doing regularly
As more buyers delegate research, and increasingly some purchasing decisions, to AI agents, a site an agent can't navigate can lose a sale before a human ever sees it, no matter how strong your visibility in AI answers otherwise is. That goes double for ecommerce sites, where the agent may be partway through a purchase when it hits the wall. Agent Usability is how you find that out on your own terms, task by task, instead of hearing about it from a customer who gave up. And if you're not sure where your site stands overall, the free AI visibility audit is a low-effort place to start.