Your Website Is About to Become a Workflow

I haven’t opened a browser for work in weeks.

When I need to compare a migrated site against its legacy version, I run /headless:parity and parallel browser agents crawl both sites, capture screenshots, and report differences. When I need overnight code changes, I set up a ralph-wiggum loop and wake up to commits. When I need DNS records updated across providers, agents handle the API calls.

The browser is still there. I’m just not the one using it.

The Collapse Is Already Happening

This isn’t speculation. The human-facing web is dying by the numbers.

Zero-click searches are eating everything:

• 56% of searches ended without a click in May 2024. By May 2025: 69%.
• When AI Overviews appear, publishers lose 47.55% of their traffic.
• CNN: -30%. Forbes: -40%. Business Insider and HuffPost: -40%.
• Chegg lost 49% of non-subscriber traffic and is suing Google.
• The travel blog The Planet D shut down entirely after a 90% traffic drop.

The dead internet theory is becoming fact:

• Bot traffic exceeded human traffic for the first time in 2024: 51% of all web activity.
• On X, estimates suggest 64% of accounts could be bots, responsible for 76% of peak traffic.
• Over 1,000 “news sites” are now run almost entirely by AI.

So much of the internet is now just dead - this whole dead internet theory, right? Whether it’s botted, whether it’s quasi-AI, LinkedIn slop.

— Alexis Ohanian, Reddit cofounder

NPR called it an “extinction-level event” for online publishers. That’s not hyperbole. The economic model that sustained the web for 25 years - human attention converted to ad impressions - is breaking.

Who’s Building for Agents

While publishers scramble, the infrastructure for the post-human web is being built.

Microsoft went all-in at Build 2025:

• NLWeb: what they call “HTML for the agentic web”
• Every NLWeb endpoint is also an MCP server
• MCP support across GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure, and Windows itself
• Their framing: MCP is TCP/IP, NLWeb is HTML. The agentic web has its protocol stack.

The browser wars have gone agentic:

• Perplexity launched Comet in July 2025
• OpenAI released Atlas in October
• Google expanded “AI Mode” in Chrome in November
• All three: browsers that browse for you

Traffic from agentic browsers is exploding:

• Retail sites saw 4,700% YoY growth in traffic from GenAI browsers (July 2025)
• Those AI-directed visitors spent 32% more time on site and viewed 10% more pages
• The visitors aren’t human. The purchases are.

What Websites Become

When the primary visitor isn’t human, website design inverts.

From destinations to endpoints:

• Your homepage matters less than your API surface
• Marketing copy matters less than structured product data
• Brand voice matters less than machine-readable specs

From user journeys to autonomous workflows:

• Users don’t navigate. Agents do.
• Instead of funnel optimization, you optimize for agent task completion
• The “conversion” happens in a context window, not on your checkout page

The web paradigm of PageRank, clicks, and funnels that has defined digital commerce for three decades is about to change. Agentic AI will transform websites from destinations into API endpoints, and user journeys into autonomous workflows.

— Shelly Palmer

The web won’t disappear. It will bifurcate. One layer for humans (shrinking, premium, authenticity-focused). One layer for agents (exploding, structured, machine-optimized). Most traffic will be in the second layer. Most value creation too.

The Economic Inversion

The ad model assumed human attention. That assumption is breaking.

The math doesn’t work:

• CPCs are rising (up 12.88% to $5.26 average) because click supply is shrinking
• 78% of publisher digital revenue still comes from advertising
• But if humans aren’t visiting, there’s nothing to monetize

The Faustian bargain:

• Publishers lose traffic when stories become AI snippets
• But opting out of AI Overviews means opting out of Google Search entirely
• “Publishers are kind of in a bind”

What replaces ad revenue when the audience is machines? Transaction fees on agent-completed purchases? API access charges? Structured data licensing? Nobody knows yet. But the current model is visibly failing.

What This Doesn’t Solve

Browser agents are impressive but imperfect:

• OpenAI’s CUA scores 38.1% on real-world desktop tasks. Humans score 72.4%.
• Complex interfaces (calendars, slideshows) still break agents
• Security and privacy concerns are real - agents accessing bank accounts need human gates

The human-readable web won’t vanish entirely:

• Authentic human content becomes premium
• Some experiences (entertainment, social connection) resist agent mediation
• Regulatory and accessibility requirements will maintain human-facing layers

What This Means for Builders

If you’re building for the web, your audience is shifting.

The immediate changes:

• Structured data and schema.org aren’t optional
• API-first architecture beats page-first
• Machine-readable beats human-readable (then layer human UI on top)
• Test with agents, not just humans

The deeper shift:

• The SDLC collapse I wrote about applies here too
• Agents handle execution. Humans handle judgment.
• Your job isn’t building interfaces. It’s building surfaces agents can work with.

I’ve been living this shift for months. Claude orchestrating external tools. Autonomous loops shipping code overnight. Headless browsers I never see. The human-in-the-loop moments are review and judgment. Everything else is delegated.

That’s not just my workflow anymore. It’s becoming the web’s architecture.

The web you learned to build for - human visitors, page views, click-through rates - is contracting. What’s expanding is a machine-readable substrate that agents navigate on our behalf. Websites become workflows. Destinations become endpoints. The browser becomes optional.

Build accordingly.