Concepts · plain language
Agents vs. skills — what's the difference?
Short version: agents act, skills are abilities. An agent is the AI program doing things — browsing, crawling, booking, coding. A skill is one ability you plug into it.
Agents — the actors
- · Software that acts on someone's behalf
- · Visits and reads websites (crawlers, browsing agents)
- · Examples: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, computer-use agents
- · Identified by a user-agent string
- · You allow or block them in your robots.txt
Skills — the abilities
- · One capability, plugged into an assistant
- · Browse the web, read files, search Notion, query a database
- · Technically: MCP servers (Model Context Protocol)
- · Installed per app — or hosted by the vendor (zero install)
- · You add them to your own assistant
The mental model: your AI assistant + skills = an agent. The assistant decides what to do, skills are how it does it — and websites decide via robots.txt which agents they let in. agentics covers all three: the skills to act, the agents who knock on your door, and the free check that tells you whether your domain is ready for them.
FAQ
What is an AI agent?
An agent is an AI program that acts on someone's behalf: it visits websites, crawls content, books appointments, writes code, sends mail. ChatGPT browsing a page for you, ClaudeBot crawling the web for training data, or a coding assistant editing your project — all agents. Agents are the actors.
What is a skill?
A skill (technically: an MCP server, after the Model Context Protocol) is a single ability you plug into an AI assistant or agent — operating a browser, reading files in a folder you allow, searching your Notion, querying a database. Skills don't act on their own; they are the tools an agent uses.
How do agents and skills work together?
An assistant like Claude becomes an agent the moment it uses skills to act: the Playwright skill lets it drive a browser, the Filesystem skill lets it read your documents, the Notion skill connects your workspace. The assistant decides what to do; the skills are how it does it.
Why does this matter for my website?
Because both sides visit your domain: agents (crawlers like GPTBot or ClaudeBot, browsing agents, MCP clients) read your site, and skills determine what assistants can do with it. If your robots.txt blocks the wrong agents or your content isn't machine-readable, you're invisible to all of it. That is exactly what the free agentics check audits.
Do I need an agent or a skill?
If you want an AI to do something for you, you need an assistant (you probably already have one — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) plus the right skill for the task. If you run a website and want to control which AIs may read it, you deal with agents — see our agents directory for who they are and how to allow or block them.
Deep dive: What is an AI agent?
The 6 agent families and how to control their access.
Deep dive: What is an AI skill?
MCP servers explained without the jargon.
New to skills? Start here
The 5-minute foundation — no tech background needed.
Recipes
Step-by-step guides with the exact prompt to paste.