Dinner with a friend who runs three specialty grocery stores. She wanted to know how she gets her inventory "into the agents." I told her to publish clean structured data and she'd be discoverable. Correct answer. Also worthless, and it took me about a week to work out why.
In September the W3C and GS1 are running a workshop on commerce between humans and AI agents. The call for participation asks, in its own words:
"How can the Web remain truly open so that content creators are not forced to choose a closed or semi-closed ecosystem?"
Nobody puts a question that wide open into a public document when they already know how it comes out. The people writing the plumbing are not sure which way this goes.
Gatekeepers show up. They always show up. What I want to know is the shape of the gate, because this one is not shaped like the last one.
Search intermediation set order over a set you could still see. When the European Commission worked through Google Shopping, what it found was rival comparison sites demoted rather than deleted: the best-placed one landing around page four, in a market where the first result on page two collects roughly one percent of clicks. That kills a business without removing it. You were still in the index. A stubborn shopper could scroll to you, and you could climb without asking anyone's permission. SEO was a grubby trade, but it was a trade you could practice alone.
An agent hands back three options. There is no page four to be exiled to and no scroll to reward persistence.
Now the part I got wrong at dinner. Describing your business in machine-readable form really is close to permissionless. The commerce specifications going around let a company park a profile at a predictable address and declare what it sells and what it can do; one of them uses the phrase "permissionless onboarding" outright. Nobody has locked the front door.
Getting invoked is a different transaction. Conformance buys you the ability to answer a question. Somebody else decides who gets asked. Payments make it concrete: Visa's current rules require an agent-payment provider to enroll in its program and register before it can transact on those rails at all. And I have yet to read a specification that commits to querying a business because the business conformed. Publishing is a prerequisite that guarantees nothing downstream of itself, which is the half "The Indifferent Buyer" left open.
The specifications that survive are the ones that barely say anything. A GS1 barcode number is deliberately non-significant: the digits identify an item and describe nothing about it. Governance is correspondingly thin — a global office allocates prefixes to national member organizations, which license company prefixes to firms, which number their own products. A nearly contentless string, scanned billions of times a day, four decades in and still working.
So pay attention to who is co-convening. GS1's presence suggests the position that lasts belongs to whoever maintains the thinnest registry everyone has to touch, not whoever writes the richest protocol. And that registry holds leverage in both directions, because the agent builders also need a canonical place to look. Search never had that property. It sat between buyers and sellers. A registry sits between sellers and the machines doing the buying.
What I'd tell my friend now: take the agent roadmap and draw a line down the middle. On the left, everything you can switch on by yourself. On the right, everything that needs another party to say yes. Then write a name beside every row on the right. She couldn't. Most people I ask can't. That empty column is the strategy question.