Server logs show GPTBot and friends crawling your pages. No sales. Before blaming the technology, check the five most common reasons agents don't convert:
- No machine-readable price list. If an agent has to render JavaScript or parse a PDF to learn what things cost, it moves on. Fix: llms.txt with real prices + buy links.
- Checkout requires a human ritual. Email confirmation loops, phone verification, "create an account first" — agents abandon at the first wall. Fix: Stripe Payment Links or x402 for pure-machine flows.
- Contradictory facts across surfaces. Your llms.txt says €19, your homepage banner says €25 launch special. Agents quote both and trust neither. Fix: one canonical source of truth.
- Nothing purchasable is actually reachable. A beautiful catalog where every "buy" button is a mailto:. Fix: resolvable checkout URLs in your machine surfaces.
- You never declared the machine path. No x402 manifest, no agents.txt, no API. Agents default to the human flow — which they can't complete. Fix: pick one machine-payable rail and ship it.
The pattern behind all five: humans improvise, machines don't. Every implicit step that a human would figure out is a dead end for an automated buyer.