This is Part 3 in a five-part series on optimizing websites for the agentic web. Part 1 covered the evolution from SEO to AAIO. Part 2 explored how to get your content cited in AI responses. This article goes deeper: the protocols forming the infrastructure layer that make everything else possible. The early web needed HTTP to transport data, HTML to structure content, and the W3C to keep everyone building on the same foundation. Without those shared standards, we’d have ended up with a fragmented collection of incompatible networks instead of a single web. The agentic web is at that same inflection point. AI agents need standardized ways to connect to tools, talk to each other, query websites, and understand codebases. Without shared protocols, every AI vendor builds proprietary integrations, and the result is the same fragmentation the early web narrowly avoided. Four protocols are emerging as the foundational layer.…