Making your site agent-friendly must never come at the cost of search rankings. That is why ADN has one non-negotiable rule: > Googlebot and social unfurlers always receive untouched passthrough.
Why this matters
Many "agent-friendly" proposals suggest serving Markdown or simplified HTML to all bots. That is dangerous for SEO:
• Googlebot expects your canonical HTML. Substituting Markdown can cause indexing mismatches.
• Social unfurlers (facebookexternalhit, Slackbot, Twitterbot) parse OG tags from your real HTML. Serving a different shape breaks previews.
• Procurement teams rightly ask: "Will this hurt our rankings?" The answer must be an unqualified no.
How ADN enforces it
Machine traffic is classified before your origin is touched. The legacy_seo_social class includes:
• Googlebot (all variants)
• facebookexternalhit
• Slackbot, Twitterbot, LinkedInBot
• Other search and social preview crawlers
These requests are proxied to your origin and returned unchanged. No Markdown substitution. No content stripping. No caching layer that alters the response body.
What other classes receive
Agent-friendly optimization targets different visitors:
• answer_engine — Clean Markdown + JSON-LD for AI answer indexers
• bulk_training — Corpus export on agreed terms
• developer_agent — MCP tools and llms.txt for IDE agents
• live_fetch — Fast Markdown for user-triggered chat fetches
Each class gets the shape its job needs. Search engines get exactly what you published.
Verifying in production
After connecting a domain, open Analytics in the ADN dashboard. Filter by class legacy_seo_social. Every row should show response shape passthrough. If it does not, that is a bug — not a feature.
SEO + GEO together
Traditional SEO and generative engine optimization are complementary:
• SEO — Googlebot sees your real HTML. Rankings and snippets stay under your control.
• GEO — Answer engines and agents get structured content they can quote without burning tokens on markup noise.
ADN routes both from the same gateway. The classifier decides; your origin stays authoritative for search.