Stop Scraping, Start Talking: The Agentic Web Is Here

When ChatGPT researches a product for you, it does something absurd: it scrapes HTML.

Think about that. You ask a sophisticated AI agent a nuanced question—"What does this product actually do for teams like mine?"—and instead of getting an answer from the source, the AI reads menus, divs, footers, cookie banners, and tries to infer what you wanted to know.

That's not a conversation. That's archaeology.

The Web We Built vs. The Web We Need

We built the web for browsers. Visual hierarchy. Navigation menus. Hero images. Call-to-action buttons. Every pixel optimized for human eyes scanning pages.

Now we're forcing artificial intelligence to pretend it's a browser. To crawl markup designed for visual rendering and extract meaning from SEO-optimized noise. To guess answers from content designed to rank, not to inform.

The result: hallucinations, inaccuracies, and responses cobbled together from marketing fluff. AI agents scrape SEO-biased content and present it as objective truth. Users get answers that mix legitimate information with guesses based on what the AI could parse from HTML soup.

This isn't an AI problem. It's a protocol problem.

Imagine a Different Web

What if websites could actually answer questions?

Not "here's my markup, good luck parsing it." But "here's the answer, tailored to the question being asked."

The conversation would work like this:

• AI sends the actual question to the website's endpoint
• The website responds with a structured, intent-aware answer
• No guessing. No scraping. No SEO gymnastics.

The AI asks: "Does your platform integrate with Salesforce?" The website doesn't return a page where Salesforce is mentioned somewhere in a features list. It returns: "Yes, native Salesforce integration via OAuth, syncs contacts and opportunities bidirectionally, certified ISV partner since 2022."

That's the agentic web. Websites that respond to intelligence rather than wait to be crawled by it.

The Protocol Layer That Makes It Work

This vision is becoming real. Initiatives like Agentic Web are building the protocol infrastructure for AI-native website interaction.

The architecture is elegant. Companies expose machine-readable endpoints at /.well-known/mcp containing their capabilities. AI agents discover these endpoints and understand what questions the company can answer and what actions it can perform. Then users interact through natural conversation.

The technical foundation uses JSON-RPC 2.0 for agent-to-endpoint communication. Responses include timestamps and digital signatures for verification. It's not about trust—it's about verified, first-party data from the source.

The current approach looks like this:

AI Agent → Scrapes Web → Guesses Answer

The agentic web approach:

AI Agent → Verified API → Trusted Answer

Two Capabilities That Change Everything

Verified Responses

Instead of AI inferring answers from scraped content, vendors engage in real conversations. They can ask qualifying questions. They deliver personalized, authoritative answers about security certifications, pricing, integrations, SLAs—whatever the actual question requires.

The website becomes the source of truth, not a collection of documents the AI has to interpret.

Possible Actions

Conversation leads to action. AI agents can complete tasks like scheduling demos, opening support tickets, requesting quotes, or initiating free trials—without forms, without friction.

Users say what they want. The website makes it happen. No more filling out fields designed for CRM hygiene rather than user experience.

Why This Matters for B2B

The shift to agentic research is already underway. When B2B buyers evaluate software, they increasingly start with AI:

• "What are the best options for [category]?"
• "Compare [Product A] vs [Product B] for our use case"
• "What should I know about [vendor] before the demo?"

If the AI can only scrape your website, it's guessing at answers based on whatever it could parse. If your competitors have agentic endpoints that provide accurate, structured responses, guess whose information the AI will trust and cite?

The companies that let machines talk to them—not crawl them—will own the AI-assisted research channel.

The Standards Are Emerging

This isn't speculative infrastructure. The protocols are being built on open foundations:

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) from Anthropic for standardized agent communication
• Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A) from Google for agent interoperability
• NLWeb and similar frameworks for natural language web interaction

No vendor lock-in. Open standards. The web that evolved from HTML for documents is evolving again—to protocols for conversation.

The Website as an Intelligent Entity

Here's where this leads: the most effective websites won't just serve content to agents. They'll become agents themselves.

Instead of waiting to be crawled, they actively engage. Instead of hoping AI parses their marketing correctly, they provide direct answers. Instead of being passive document collections, they're intelligent entities representing your product in every conversation—with AI agents and human buyers alike.

The next evolution of websites isn't prettier pages. It's interfaces for reasoning.

What This Means for Your Website Today

The agentic web is emerging now. Companies building for it will establish positions that compound over time. Those ignoring it will become increasingly invisible to AI-assisted buyers.

The practical implications:

• Your website has two audiences now—AI agents that research and humans who decide. Both need to be served.
• Conversational endpoints become essential—not chatbots that deflect, but interfaces that actually answer questions with expertise.
• Machine-readable structure matters—structured data, clear answers, accessible content that agents can process.
• First-party verification wins—agents will trust verified responses from your endpoint over scraped interpretations of your content.

From Crawling to Conversation

The current web forces AI to be an archaeologist—digging through markup, inferring meaning, guessing at answers. The agentic web makes AI a conversationalist—asking questions, receiving answers, taking action.

That's not a minor upgrade. It's a protocol-level transformation of how the web works.

The winners will be the companies that build for conversation. That expose endpoints for AI interaction. That let machines talk to them rather than crawl them.

The web built for browsers is becoming a web built for intelligence. Is your website ready to have a conversation?