AI agent
An AI agent is an AI system that does not just answer questions but completes tasks on a user's behalf: it plans steps, retrieves information and uses tools and interfaces — for instance to compare offers or prepare an enquiry.
The difference from a simple chatbot: a chatbot answers questions, an AI agent pursues a goal. It breaks a task into steps, gathers the information it needs along the way and uses tools to get there — from website access to dedicated interfaces. “Where do I find…?” becomes “handle this for me”.
For businesses this means the next visitor to your website may not be a person but an agent researching on a customer's behalf. It does not admire your photography; it reads facts — availability, services, prices, ways to get in touch. Machine-readable content and controlled interfaces such as MCP decide whether your business is usable by agents or simply skipped. What is accessible remains your decision.
Concretely for South Tyrol: a guest asks their assistant to find accommodation matching certain criteria and to send an enquiry straight away. The agent can only recommend businesses whose details it can retrieve and understand reliably. Becoming machine-readable today lays the groundwork for appearing in exactly those recommendations tomorrow.
Frequently asked questions.
What role do Google reviews play in AI recommendations?
For Google, a proven one: in local search and on Google Maps, Google explicitly names the number of reviews and positive ratings as a ranking factor. How much other AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Perplexity weigh reviews, no provider discloses. It is plausible that they read them, because review profiles are public — it is not proven.
What matters is the interplay: reviews work best when your name, address and phone number are the same everywhere and your website confirms the same facts in machine-readable form. So look after your Google Business Profile, ask every customer for a review, not just the happy ones, and reply calmly — especially to critical voices. Selectively asking only for positive reviews, or offering incentives for them, is prohibited by Google.
What is allowed and what is not is covered in detail in Google reviews and AI recommendations: what really counts.
What does my business gain if AI assistants can talk directly to my website?
Your details are ready exactly where people increasingly ask. Instead of an AI scraping your page and guessing, it reads exactly the content you've provided through an open interface — MCP (Model Context Protocol): services, opening hours, contact details. The aim: fewer incorrect statements about your business and correctly sourced citations — whether an AI uses this route is up to its provider. You stay in control — you decide which content is accessible, and every access is logged.
How do I get MCP access for my website, and what's included?
We set up MCP access for you whenever you want it — it's part of expanding your website, not a mandatory component. This lets you, or an AI assistant of your choice, work directly with your own website: maintaining content, querying your own data, automating recurring tasks. We agree together on what can be accessed — opening hours, services or contact details, for example — and you always keep an overview of who accesses what and when.
The effort is manageable: one-off setup, then the access runs alongside your website. It's most worthwhile once you update content regularly or have recurring questions about your own data — then an AI can take over the routine work, on request.