Vision
Vision
Nobody Owns the Feed
The machine-readable layer of your website used to be decoration. A few structured tags under the product page, worth a marginally nicer search snippet, quietly drifting out of date. Drifting was affordable.
Something reads those tags now, and buys on them. So: how often are they wrong? No one has measured it, because until recently nothing rode on the answer.
Nobody Owns the Feed
The machine-readable layer of your website used to be decoration. A few structured tags under the product page, worth a marginally nicer search snippet, quietly drifting out of date. Drifting was affordable.
Something reads those tags now, and buys on them. So: how often are they wrong? No one has measured it, because until recently nothing rode on the answer.
Power and Fidelity
Somebody Else Decides Who Gets Asked
A friend with three specialty grocery stores asked me over dinner how she gets her inventory into the agents. Publish clean structured data, I said. Correct answer, worthless answer. Describing yourself in machine-readable form is nearly permissionless. Being asked is somebody else's call, and I've yet to read a specification that promises to query you on the grounds that you conformed. Almost nobody can name who makes that call. That blank is the strategy question.
Nothing Was Down and Everything Was Wrong
The worst incidents I've worked had nothing broken in them. Nothing down, dashboards insisting the system was fine, and a customer on the phone getting a wrong answer and entirely right to be furious. Agent commerce is being built to prove authorization: limits cleared, order confirmed, reason code assigned. Whether the choice served you produces nothing measurable, because the option you'd have picked was never acted on.
The Structured Surface
Scraping is inference. The agent downloads a page built for human eyes, guesses which button submits the order, and clicks where it thinks that button sits. Layouts shift and the guess breaks. Also, nobody on the other side agreed to any of it. Robots.txt, the file where a site lists what crawlers should skip, was standardized only in 2022, and written for search engines. It asks; it can't refuse.
A Chrome origin trial is testing the other arrangement. WebMCP, proposed by Google and Microsoft engineers, lets a site publish its own search and checkout functions as tools an agent calls directly, the way a business partner calls an API.
Reliability is what the demos show. The change worth watching is that the site becomes a counterparty. Cloudflare already treats agent traffic as a category a business can price, permit, or block. A published surface carries terms, and terms can be withdrawn.
Permission isn't fidelity, though. A site can verify an agent was authorized to buy and still have no idea whether it understood what its human wanted.
Further Reading
Past Articles
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