Remember good old-fashioned Google search? The kind where you type something, see if it gets you what you want, then type something else and check if that’s better? That’s the old-fashioned web, and it’s playing baseball: you get up to bat with a fresh swing every time you search, hoping to hit a homer, trying not to strike out. The agentic web is very different: searching is more like golf. You can pretty close to the goal in one swing, ideally, sometimes even getting a hole-in-one. And, of course, you get closer and closer to the goal with every refinement.
Sometimes, the agentic web even does entire multi-task jobs for you in one fell swoop.
That’s a big part of the future of the web, according to Dave Anderson, VP at intelligence platform Contentsquare and host of the Tech Seeking Human podcast.
“if you can automate the mundane, that’s great,” he told me on a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. “It’ll be a fascinating new world when agents are mainstream.”
But it’s not always perfect, and big retailers are pretty sure they don’t want your agents on their platforms. They hunt for better prices relentlessly, don’t go gaga over brand identities like Gucci or Ralph Lauren, and zoom right through funnels.
Plus, to retailers, agents look too much like bots.
“If we go back to the origins, having agents and synthetic bots on sites is really bad for development teams,” Anderson says. “They’re worried about it from a security perspective.”
Welcome to even more captchas asking you to prove you’re human.
The future of the world wide web, which is now 34 years young, is likely split in two. In fact, it kind of already is. Non-human activity now makes up 56.5% of internet traffic, according to Cloudflare. And that’s likely to continue to grow.
Everything is changing incredibly quickly now, Anderson says:
“At the start of this year I was like, ‘What is an agent? Why does everyone talk about agents? What’s this agent thing?’ And halfway through the year it’s like, ’Oh, that’s an agent.’ And then you’re like, ‘Wait—it’s going to do what for me now?’”
The agentic web shifts humans from on-the-job labor to middle management: oversight while agents go out and do research or work for us. They also change how we experience the web, from surfing to finding, collating, deciding, and acting.
That said, it’s early days and they still make mistakes.
I asked ChatGPT in agent mode in Atlas, OpenAI’s agentic browser, to do some optimization work on my personal website yesterday, and it split words in half while adding interlinking between related posts. Anderson asked an agent to find a great deal on a product for him during the recent Black Friday sales season, and it almost bought an over-priced item that wasn’t even discounted.
Like AI does, it then apologized for the mistake.
“And I go, ‘No, sorry, it’s not good enough. If you’re a smart agent and you’re going to buy something, and you have my credit card, then let’s make sensible decisions.’”
Clearly, some improvement is needed: LLMs are frequently confidently incorrect, and agents are generally built on or incorporate LLMs. The good news: we’re seeing increased innovation and improvements weekly.
What else will change as we move to the agentic web?
- Pages move to actions
On the original WWW, the page was the core unit of the web. On the agentic web the core unity is capability: APIs, tools, actions - Search becomes orchestration
On the old web, you searched. Now you conduct - Traffic doesn’t mean value
On the original web, more clicks meant more humans meant more value. On the agentic web, value shifts to which endpoints are best at accomplishing tasks. - User experience for humans becomes less important
Human user experience is critical now. In the future, user experience for digital agents will be increasingly important.
In other words, the original web scaled information. Remember “information wants to be free?” The agentic web, by contrast, will scale agency: the ability to act and work.
That said, the shift is only just beginning. Most digitally-savvy people probably haven’t even used an agentic workflow yet, and the technology is young.
“But thankfully we’ve been around the block and we’ve seen technology changes before,” Anderson says. ”It’s just new, and it’s going to take a little bit of learning.”
And change, as we move from doing work to overseeing work.
