For about twenty years, we all operated under a simple, almost sacred, assumption: the internet was a series of places, and the click was how you traveled between them. It was our currency, our proof of life. We built these intricate digital contraptions, funnels and landing pages and attribution models, which were all designed to court and capture this one single act.
It was a good system. It made sense. And now it’s becoming a relic.
A new kind of user has appeared on the internet, one that isn’t here to browse or wander, but to execute. These AI agents, things like Atlas, don’t care about your beautiful website. They have a job to do. They were sent to book a flight, or sign up for a free trial, or buy a pair of shoes. And when they’re done, they just deliver the result back to their human. The journey, that whole intricate path we all spent our careers optimizing, simply vanishes.
It’s a strange thing to watch, honestly. The click is becoming optional. And when the click becomes optional, the value of the places it used to take you starts to get… fuzzy.
Your newest user has no common sense
The best way I can describe an agent is as a brutally literal, tireless assistant. It will work all night, it will follow instructions to the letter, and it has limited intuition. It’s not going to stop and deeply infer when it gets blocked. It can’t guess what you, as a designer, *meant* for a button to do. It only knows what it sees.
For years, this wasn’t a huge problem, because the AI crawling the web was effectively reading with one eye closed. It saw static text, a ghost of the real thing. All the live, interactive parts of a modern website—the stuff that happens when you hover over a button, the real-time prices, the product variants that load on the fly—were invisible. It was like trying to understand a restaurant by reading a blurry photocopy of the menu from last year.
That’s over.
These new agents can see everything. They can see the JavaScript. They’re not just reading the menu anymore; they’re sitting at the table, ready to order. And if the waiter (your website) is confusing, they don’t politely ask for clarification. They just leave.
This leaves us with a new, and in my opinion, far more interesting set of problems to solve. The game is transitioning towards creating systems and structures that are *usable* by a machine in the soon to be dozens of ways that AI will interface with your business.
So, what do we actually do?
This will require us to collectively shift our philosophy.
First, you have to start watching them. You have to see your own website through the logical eyes of an agent. We’re already doing this, and the things that trip them up are both mundane and fascinating. We watched one agent fail a task because it couldn’t read the text on a button that changed color when the mouse hovered over it. A human brain just filters that out as decoration. An agent sees an obstacle and gives up. You find and fix these little points of friction, or you become invisible to a growing class of user.
Second, you have to learn to talk to them. If you sell things, you have the Agentic Commerce Protocol now, you’ve been given this 5,000-character field to describe your product. My advice is to not treat it like a place for keywords. Treat it like a conversation. Use full sentences. Tell the story of what your product is for. You’re not just describing a shoe; you’re explaining, in plain language, that this is the shoe for someone who runs in the rain but hates heavy footwear. You’re giving the agent the context it needs to make a logical connection. It’s less about SEO and more about empathy for a non-human user.
The truth is, our elaborate funnels are going to become museum pieces. The value is moving away from the journey and into the destination. The goal is no longer to be clicked, but to be the one thing the agent chooses. It’s a quieter, less visible victory, but I suspect it’s a more permanent one. And I’ve always preferred permanent things.
The brands that understand this shift, that start treating agents as a primary user with their own unique needs, are the ones who will have a place in the world that’s coming.
If you want to optimize and win in this future, contact our sales team for a demo.
