The A in AEO was never about answers

For the past couple(?) of years, “AEO” has been floating around the SEO industry. Answer Engine Optimization - the idea that you should optimize for AI-generated answers, not just search rankings.

It sounds like a paradigm shift until you look at what people actually do. They write FAQ sections. They add structured data. They tweak content to show up in AI Overviews.

In other words, they do SEO and call it AEO. But WebMCP might actually be the first thing that changes that.

WebMCP

WebMCP is a proposal from Google and Microsoft and that recently opened up for early preview in Chrome. It’s a JavaScript API that lets websites expose structured tools to AI agents running in the browser. Not content. Not markup hints. Actual callable functions.

Think of it like this: instead of hoping an AI agent can figure out how to navigate your e-commerce site by reading your DOM, you hand it a function called addToCart(productId, quantity) with a schema and a description. The agent calls it, your JavaScript runs, and the UI updates. No guessing, no brittle screen-scraping.

The proposal defines two types of APIs:

Here’s a simplified example from the spec:

 1if ("modelContext" in window.navigator) {
 2    window.navigator.modelContext.provideContext({
 3        tools: [
 4            {
 5                name: "search-products",
 6                description: "Search for products matching a query",
 7                inputSchema: {
 8                    type: "object",
 9                    properties: {
10                        query: { type: "string", description: "Search terms" },
11                        maxPrice: { type: "number", description: "Maximum price" }
12                    },
13                    required: ["query"]
14                },
15                execute({ query, maxPrice }) {
16                    // Your existing search logic
17                    return { content: [{ type: "text", text: JSON.stringify(results) }] };
18                }
19            }
20        ]
21    });
22}

If you’ve worked with MCP before, this will look familiar. That’s intentional - WebMCP is designed to align with MCP, but instead of running tools on a backend server, the tools run as client-side JavaScript in the browser. The website is the MCP server.

Why this feels different

The “A” in AEO has always stood for “Answer”. Optimize your content so AI models cite you. But that’s still just visibility - you’re optimizing to be quoted.

WebMCP isn’t about being quoted. It’s about being operated. You’re not hoping an agent reads your page. You’re giving it a searchProducts function and letting it call it.

That’s not Answer Engine Optimization. That’s Agent Engine Optimization - or whatever you want to call it. The work is fundamentally different. You’re thinking about your site as an API, not a document. What tools should you expose? What inputs does an agent need? What should it get back?

For e-commerce, it’s product search, cart management, checkout. For SaaS, it might be account actions or configuration. Content sites may not expose a checkout, but they might offer scoped search, filtered retrieval, or citation bundles. Different tools, but still tools.

Either way, writing WebMCP tools is the first time “optimizing for AI” means doing something other than SEO.

Early days

WebMCP is still in early preview. But the direction feels very interesting. We’ve been adding machine-readable layers to the web for years - meta tags, structured data, OpenGraph, web manifests. Each one helped machines understand what a page is. WebMCP is different because you’re telling agents what your page can do.

And when you’re writing those tools - deciding what to expose, how to describe it, what schema to use - that’s AEO. It just happened to be so that that the A was never about answers.