ARMX stands for Agent Readiness and Machine eXperience. It is the way Topkay measures how well your site works for the machines that now stand between you and your audience: search crawlers, AI answer engines, and the agents that browse and act on a person's behalf. SEO, AEO and GEO each look at one slice of this. ARMX names the whole thing.
Why a new term
The reader has changed. For twenty years the job was to rank a page for a person who clicks. Then answer engines started lifting a passage and stating it without the click. Now agents discover services, judge whether to trust them, pick one, and invoke it, sometimes without a web page at all. These are not three separate problems with three separate acronyms. They are one question asked at different depths: can a machine find you, understand you, trust you, choose you, and use you. ARMX is that question, made measurable.
The five pillars
Every machine interaction with your site passes through the same five stages, so ARMX scores each one.
- Discover. Can a machine reach and index your content at all. Robots access, crawlability, sitemaps, internal links and crawl efficiency live here. If you cannot be discovered, nothing else counts.
- Understand. Once reached, can a machine make sense of a page and lift a clean answer from it. This is your answerability: passages that stand on their own, structured data, clear topics. It is the same number as your Answerability Index.
- Trust. Does the machine have reason to believe you. A clear brand and entity, one canonical home instead of duplicates, a signed identity, and consistent signals across the site. Self-declared identity is treated as weak, so proof matters.
- Select. When a machine has several options, does it choose you. This is competitive: whether your passages beat the field for a query, and whether your capabilities match what is being asked for. Being understood is not the same as being picked.
- Invoke. Can an agent actually use you. In the agent world the discoverable unit is often an endpoint, not a page: an Agent Card an agent can read, capabilities it can call, and a way to authenticate. Most sites score low here today, because they have never published one. That is the frontier.
How the score works
Your ARMX Score is a single number from these five pillars. Discover, Understand and Trust are measured from your crawl. Select and Invoke are measured from the agent surface, chiefly your Agent Card, so they fill in once you publish one. Understand is your Answerability Index, so the two always agree. The point of one headline number is to see, at a glance, how ready your site is for machine readers, and the pillars below it tell you where the gap is.
ARMX and SEO, AEO, GEO
ARMX does not replace SEO, AEO or GEO, it contains them. Classic SEO is most of Discover and part of Understand. AEO is Understand and part of Select. GEO spans Understand, Trust and Select across generative engines. Agent readiness is Invoke, and much of Select, and it is the part almost no one measures yet. If you already do SEO and AEO well, ARMX shows you the ground you have not covered.
Optimise the proxy and you game a number. Optimise for ARMX and you are building a site that machines can find, read, believe, choose and use. That is the outcome, not the metric.