Act 3 · 7 min

What I Think Is Coming

Speculation grounded in experience.

3.1 · The web evolved in eras

What changed isn't the data — it's the path to it.

1991

Era 01 Web 1.0

GET

Static HTML

read-only documents

SQL

Read

2004

Era 02 Web 2.0

POST

HTML + forms

pretty UIs to read & write

SQL

Read · Write

2010s

Era 03 Cloud / SaaS

REST

SaaS portals

multi-tenant collaboration

API

Share

2025

Era 04 · now Web for Agents

×

HTML

bypassed

×

Transact

The database stayed → The wrapper changed → Agents skip the wrapper

3.2 · Agents need their own protocols

The page never loads. The JS never fires. Your tag never runs.

The bypass

BrowserPage load

JS / GTMAnalytics

replaced by

AgentProtocol

Tool callAPI / Data

MCP Anthropic · 2024

Model Context Protocol — agents call tools and read context from any compliant server.

A2A Google · 2025

Agent-to-Agent — agents discover and delegate to each other across vendors.

AG-UI CopilotKit · 2025

Streams agent output into UIs — the new "frontend" for an agent.

ACP IBM / BeeAI · 2025

Agent Communication Protocol — standardised request/response for orchestration.

Coming up tonight · Serge Shkvarnytskyi · Stape

Server-side tracking: From audit to reporting

"Serge talks server-side later — same trust and control problem from a different angle. We're both moving collection off the page."

3.3 · Payment Required is back

HTTP status

402

Payment Required

Reserved 1991. Unused for 30 years. Revived by AI agents in 2025.

Agent hits a paid endpoint → server returns 402 + price → agent signs a stablecoin payment → retries with payment receipt header → gets the resource. One round trip. No accounts, no API keys, no human in the loop.

x402

Coinbase · Cloudflare · Stripe

HTTP 402 revival. Pay-per-request stablecoin micropayments. Cloudflare uses it for pay-per-crawl.

x402.org

AP2

Google · 60+ partners

Agent Payments Protocol. Authorization & audit framework. A2A x402 extension is production-ready.

cloud.google.com · AP2

TAP

Visa

Trusted Agent Protocol. Identity & merchant trust signals for agent-initiated card payments.

visa.com · TAP

ACP

Stripe · OpenAI · Mastercard

Agentic Commerce Protocol. Open spec for agent checkout in third-party storefronts.

stripe.com · ACP

Galaxy estimates agentic commerce reaches $3–5 trillion by 2030.

3.4 · Websites become research surfaces

Crawled for what's not in the training set. Visited by humans almost not at all.

Why AI bots crawl

Training79%

Search17%

User actions3.2%

Source: Cloudflare · AI crawler traffic by purpose

Crawl-to-refer ratio · July 2025

Anthropic38,000:1

OpenAI3,700:1 peak

Perplexity~100:1

Pages crawled per page referred. Source: Cloudflare · The crawl-to-click gap

Your website used to be the destination. It's becoming a freshness layer — queried only for what isn't already in the model's head.

3.5 · The competitive surface

Everyone has the same models now. The moat lives somewhere else.

Pillar 1

Unique data

yours alone

Your customers' prompts. Your domain knowledge. Your private corpus. The only thing competitors can't copy.

← this is what Act 2 was about

+

Pillar 2

The model

commodity

GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen. Open weights, hosted APIs, drop-in swaps. Everyone has the same access — you, me, your competitor.

no edge here anymore

+

Pillar 3

Harness & UX

your surface

The agent loop, the tool catalogue, the website, the chat interface, the eval harness. How your data and the model become a product.

the visible part of the moat

Your website is the visible surface of your harness — the part the world sees of how well you've combined your unique data with a commodity model. It's not the destination anymore. It's the showcase.

3.6 · The new customer journey

Not a funnel anymore. A stack — with humans on top and protocols at the bottom.

Tier 1

Human

Intent Judgement Trust Approval Satisfaction

Tier 2

Agent

Plan Retrieve Tool use Reason Retry Hand-off

Tier 3

Protocol

MCP A2A x402 / AP2 OpenAPI OTel

Coming up tonight · Caroline Vidal · DFDS

Agentic Lead Enrichment & Attribution

"Caroline goes deeper on agentic enrichment after me — she'll show you how to attribute and act on these stratified journeys. I'm here to ask whether you're capturing them at all."

3.7 · A new class of data

Some metrics rename. Most are genuinely new.

Web analytics

Agent analytics

Pageviews

Tool calls

Sessions

Traces

Conversion rate

Task success rate

Bounce rate

Hallucination & retry rate

Cost per acquisition

Cost per task (tokens × rate)

Page load time

Time-to-first-token / latency budget

Funnels

Trace trees

Custom dimensions

LLM-as-judge scores

BigQuery

Still BigQuery

The tools changed. The thinking didn't.