AI agent
Also called: agentic AI, LLM agent
An AI agent is a software system built on a large language model that pursues a goal by reasoning, planning, and taking actions with tools, adjusting its next step based on feedback from the environment. Unlike a fixed workflow, an agent decides for itself how to reach the goal.
An agent is more than a chatbot that answers in one turn. It runs in a loop: it takes a goal, plans, calls a tool, reads the result, then decides the next move. Anthropic describes agents as systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, in contrast to workflows, where the path is hardcoded in advance. The agent gets ground truth from the environment at each step, so it can correct course instead of following a script.
What sits inside an agent
Most agents combine four parts:
- a model that reasons and breaks the task into steps
- memory (short-term context plus longer conversation history)
- tools (APIs, search, code execution) it can call
- an orchestration layer that tracks state and decides when to stop
Example: you ask an agent to “book the cheapest flight next Friday.” It searches, compares fares by calling a flights.search tool, holds the candidates in memory, picks one, and completes the booking, all without you spelling out each step.
Agents trade latency and cost for flexibility, so they fit open-ended problems where you cannot predict the number of steps. For narrow, repeatable tasks, a plain prompt or a fixed workflow is usually cheaper and more predictable. Anthropic’s own advice is to start with the simplest thing that works and add agent complexity only when the task actually needs it.
How it affects your traffic
AI agents do not read your site the way a person skims a landing page. They parse structured, machine-readable facts (prices, specs, clear claims) and pull the answer they can act on, so a page written only to persuade a human can get skipped by an agent that just wants parseable data. As more people hand research and buying to agents built on tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, showing up in what the agent retrieves becomes its own traffic channel. Our AI SEO work makes your pages easy for these agents to read, quote, and cite, so you stay in the answer set instead of going invisible.
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