IAO gives agents a cleaner way to understand—and verify—your site.
IAO is our practical name for improving the interface between a website and the AI agents people use. It combines explicit identity, structured facts, provenance, evidence and usable next steps. It complements SEO, AEO and GEO; it does not replace them.
IAO is not presented here as an official Google, OpenAI or web-standard requirement. It describes the work we perform at the agent interface.
The complete visibility-to-use stack
Each discipline answers a different question. Strong sites can use all four.
Can people and search engines find the page?
Technical access, crawlability, useful content, internal links and eligible search presentation remain the foundation.
Can a system extract a clear answer?
Direct language, visible facts, appropriate structured data and consistent answers reduce ambiguity.
Can a generative system represent the service accurately?
Strong source material, corroboration, current details and clear limitations give generative answers better evidence to work from.
Can an agent identify, verify and use the service?
The original URL, service owner, bridge provider, evidence, constraints and available interfaces are declared in one agent-readable representation.
The original URL remains the source. We are the transparent bridge.
A hosted Share with Agent manifest does not pretend to come from the customer’s domain. It names the original service, the exact original page, the account holder’s declaration, and Share with Agent’s limited role as host and structured-context provider.
- Original page and service domain identified
- Bridge provider and authority basis disclosed
- Evidence URLs supplied for verification
- Conflicts pause material action instead of being hidden
{
"relationship": "transparent_hosted_bridge",
"original_url": "https://customer.example/product",
"bridge_provider": "Share with Agent",
"evidence": ["original page", "service homepage"],
"conflict_policy": "verify and disclose"
}What the bridge tells an agent
1. Identity
This representation concerns the named service and original URL. Share with Agent is not the service owner.
2. Provenance
The account holder supplied and reviewed the context under an authorization declaration. The manifest states that basis without claiming technical control of the original domain.
3. Evidence
The agent receives the original page, service homepage and structured bridge URL, with instructions to re-check material claims before consequential actions.
4. Safe use
The agent may reject the layer, warn its user, verify independently and stop on conflicts. Enrollment, payment and other material operations remain consent-gated.
For Google’s AI search features, ordinary SEO requirements still apply and structured data should match visible page content. OpenAI separately documents crawler controls for search discovery. Our operational layer is additional publisher guidance; no crawler, search engine or assistant is required to use it.