Someone else will

There’s a concern I hear a lot when agency owners talk about going back to existing clients and pitching new work.

People are worried that if they suggest accessibility fixes or SEO improvements their clients are going to wonder why things weren’t set up properly in the first place.

It’s a fair worry. And even though I do think there are ways around that objection, I understand why people are hesitant.

But selling to someone who already trusts you is easier and most cost effective than finding someone new. That’s been true forever, but it might have never been as true as it is today.

I’ve been hesitant to talk too confidently about “AI compatibility” because if you ask 10 professionals what it means, you’ll probably get 14 different answers.

But Lighthouse recently added a new “Agentic Browsing” category that evaluates how well a site is constructed for machine interaction. And unless you launched their site in the last few weeks, this completely erases any objection about why it wasn’t done differently to begin with — because it didn’t exist.

That gives you a very natural and legitimate reason to go back to your clients and explain that things are changing, and you’re staying on top of it.

All of our clients are starting to think about AI. Chances are they don’t fully understand what’s changing, but whether it’s somewhere down the TikTok rabbit hole or a cold outreach email, someone’s going to be in their ear about it.

Shouldn’t that be you?

It doesn’t have to be a hard sell, something simple like:

“Things are changing, and Google’s starting to measure how well your site is set up for AI agents and machine interaction. I’m reviewing this for all our sites so we can see if anything is worth improving.”

That doesn’t sound like an upsell to me, it sounds like good stewardship. The kind that goes beyond updating plugins and automated backups.

Because the lighthouse test is measurable (even if it’s experimental), it’s not like you’re out there selling snake oil. This is something Google is now assessing about every website online. And that makes this a great opportunity to get out in front of it and help control the AI narrative with your clients.

You can test sites here, and the Agentic Browsing score will be listed alongside the Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO scores you’re used to. Except, instead of going from 0-100, the Agentic Browsing score is a simple pass/fail. It covers things like your accessibility tree structure, cumulative layout shift, MCP registration, and llms.txt instructions.

An audit, a report, and some cleanup (if necessary) makes for a great little productized service — and from my experience with it so far, none of it is that difficult (so don’t be intimidated).

If you have a dozen care plan clients, I’d be shocked if you couldn’t put a few hundred extra bucks in your pocket in the next week.

But the money is secondary. What you’re really doing is showing up for your clients and making sure they’re being taken care of.

If you don’t, someone else will be more than happy to.