Rebuilding the web for agents

Official Schedule Context

Official Description

AI apps are the new browsers. And the web is not ready. For thirty years we built the web for human

eyes, benchmarked by tools like Lighthouse: humans measuring human behavior. That era is ending. Bot

traffic has overtaken human traffic, and we can't hand-write a benchmark for what comes next - every

best practice goes stale the moment models improve. Your next customer isn't a human with a credit

card - it's an agent with a protocol, and it would rather not see your interface at all. That shift

moves the UX question from how a human experiences your product to how an agent does, and how a

human experiences that agent. Already, some services report their MCP traffic outpacing their web

UI. The agent is rapidly becoming the main surface, and it always takes the path of least friction.

Claude Code might consistently prefer PostHog over Mixpanel simply because PostHog *has the better

agentic surface* - and Mixpanel loses customers without a human ever weighing in. Meanwhile the

agentic web protocol stack keeps multiplying, a new one seemingly every week. The harder problem

isn't discovery - it's operability: whether the web can actually be run once an agent arrives, and

what is the ideal stack for that. Should we lean into headless protocols, or ones like WebMCP that

treat the UI as the source of truth? Does a site need to implement every new spec just to support

every kind of agent? So we stopped guessing and watched real agents work the whole journey:

finding, understanding, authenticating, acting, handing back to a human. The findings go against the

last year of agent-readiness advice. Agents ignore the files we built for them, reaching for docs

and homepages instead - and whatever they reach, they trust and act on. But when those files are

linked properly, their usage jumps 4x. The format isn't the key for the agentic web. Reachability

is. The web will never be completely headless. Some moments still demand a human: choosing a seat,

comparing options, casually exploring. And agents aren't uniform - some want full headless access,

others spin up a browser to fill the gaps, but that's a friction point, not a free fallback. So the

web is going nearly headless, always with a human eye at the end. This talk maps the entire agent

web landscape based on findings from real agent journeys research: * Which protocols earn their

place and which are noise. Why "agent-ready" and "accessible" are the same engineering problem.

How MCP Apps close the last mile - and when headful protocols like WebMCP step in. * How to build

for agent-readiness that survives the next model - not a checklist that's stale in a month. The gap

between ready and not is about to separate the relevant from the invisible.

Related YouTube Video

MCP UI: Extending the frontier — Liad Yosef and Ido Salomon, MCP Apps (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

Transcript Status

Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.

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