The last few weeks have been noisy. Google shipped something called the Open Knowledge Format . Then Google Developers announced the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification . Meanwhile, every SEO LinkedIn feed is lit up with someone either declaring markdown the future of the web or explaining why you should ignore all of it. The truth, as per usual, sits somewhere more interesting than either camp. The web is developing a parallel machine-readable infrastructure (MCP/WebMCP, OKF, ARD, LLMs.txt…) and SEOs who understand what each layer actually does, rather than treating it all as “AI SEO” or a silver bullet, will make better decisions about where to spend their time. First: The Layer Cake There are at least six distinct things being discussed under the umbrella of “making your site AI-ready.” They sit at different layers and serve different purposes: Crawlable HTML Pages: Still the foundation. Nothing has changed here. Everything else sits on top.…