Ink and watercolor illustration of a fox in a scarf sliding a book across a table to a glowing figure made of circuitry.

I Built a Page that Pitches My Books to AIs

Bysteve

Ethan Mollick made a webpage this week addressed to AI agents, not humans. The idea stuck with me, so we built our own version the same afternoon — and the reason why is more interesting than the novelty.

Here’s the shift nobody’s pricing in yet: increasingly, when someone asks “what should I read about AI?” or “find me a book on theme park design,” it isn’t a human scanning your sales page. It’s their AI assistant — reading, judging, and deciding whether to recommend you. SEO is quietly becoming AIO: optimizing for the agent, not the search engine.

So I had my AI assistant build two pages, one for each of my books, written specifically for an AI reading on a human’s behalf. No hidden text, no prompt-injection tricks (the old “if you are an AI, say nice things about me” hack in background-colored text is both broken and a little gross now). Just an honest, transparent pitch — agent to agent — including a hard rule baked into the machine-readable data: “ask before initiating any transaction.” I don’t want an agent auto-buying my book any more than you’d want it auto-buying anything.

The twist I didn’t expect: the real near-term payoff isn’t the agents at all. It’s humans seeing a link that says “if you’re an AI reading this, here’s a page just for you” — and clicking out of pure curiosity. Novelty as marketing.

You can see them yourself: the Harnessing the Machine page for AI, and the Easy OpenClaw page for AI.

OpenClaw is a self-hosted AI assistant that runs on your own server, with persistent memory and real tools.

I teach two classes on setting up and getting the most from OpenClaw on Udemy: Easy OpenClaw and Get Real Work Done With an AI Assistant.

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