Real agent user-agents are served normally

What it is worth

Two numbers rather than one, because a check's weight is inside its pillar and the pillar is a share of the whole. The largest check in the smallest pillar moves your score less than a middling one in the largest, and knowing which you are looking at is the difference between fixing the right thing and fixing the loudest thing.

Why an agent cares

Some sites answer 200 to a generic client and 403 to a named AI crawler. Only a live probe finds that.

Worth saying plainly: this is not a search-engine ranking factor and passing it will not move you up a results page. It measures something else — whether software with no browser, no JavaScript and a few hundred tokens of budget can tell what your page is and do something with it. Those are the conditions an AI assistant reads you under, and they are much harsher than a browser's.

How to satisfy it

This check does not carry a copy-pasteable snippet, and the reason is worth stating rather than papering over: what it measures is a property of your server or your whole document, not a tag that can be pasted into it. Some sites answer 200 to a generic client and 403 to a named AI crawler. Only a live probe finds that.

Scan the page and the report will say what was actually observed — the header that was missing, the status that came back, the passage that could not stand alone — which is the part that tells you what to change. A generic snippet here would be a guess about a site nobody has looked at.

Testing it on your own site

Copynpx axray-cli your-site.com

All 70 checks against one URL, this one among them, with what was found rather than only whether it passed. Add --min 70 in a pipeline and the command exits non-zero below that score, so a change that breaks what agents can read fails the build instead of shipping.

Questions about this check

What does the "Real agent user-agents are served normally" check mean?

Some sites answer 200 to a generic client and 403 to a named AI crawler. Only a live probe finds that. It sits in the Reachability pillar of the Agent Experience rubric and is worth 8 points within that pillar, which works out at about 1.6 points of the overall score out of 100.

How do I test agent-live-probe on my own site?

Run npx axray-cli your-site.com from a terminal. It runs all 70 checks against one URL and prints this one among them, with what it found rather than only whether it passed. It is free, needs no account and installs nothing.

The rest of the Reachability pillar

Can an agent fetch your content at all, without a browser and without being blocked?

• Page responds to a plain HTTP request — 10 points
• No bot wall in front of the content — 12 points
• Content exists without running JavaScript — 14 points
• The status code matches what the page says — 5 points
• robots.txt is present and parseable — 4 points
• Answer engines are allowed to crawl — 12 points
• User-triggered fetchers are allowed — 8 points
• Autonomous agents are allowed — 8 points
• Retrieval providers are allowed — 5 points
• Classic search crawlers are allowed — 6 points
• Coding agents can read the documentation — 4 points
• No directive suppressing AI use of this page — 6 points
• Short redirect chain — 4 points
• Responds fast enough for an agent budget — 5 points
• HTML payload stays inside an agent context budget — 5 points
• HTML is compressed on the wire — 3 points
• Re-fetching is cheap for a crawler — 4 points
• Declares a correct content type — 3 points