Will AI Agents Kill the Web as We Know It?
October 30, 2025
The way we interact with the web today is surprisingly manual. Want to book a flight? You’ll probably head to a familiar airline’s website or open Google and type in your dates. If that site also offers hotel and car rental options, great—you might stay and book everything in one place. But more likely, you’re picky. So you go off searching for that perfect boutique hotel or the restaurant you’ve read about. Click by click, tab by tab, you stitch your trip together.
Source: Will AI Agents Kill the Web as We Know It? | Andy Budd
For better and for worse, the web is not simply for humans anymore.
The reality is, bots have long been the most important visitors for most websites, in particular Google bot, which indexes your site, and has been for decades the most important source of traffic for most successful websites.
And then many sites have APIs which are of an interface for machines or code rather than for humans. Even if most of the time that interaction is mediated through the API, ultimately it was driven by a human.
If the promise of agent’s agentic AI is real, then while a human might ask an agent to complete a task for them, and that task might involve interacting with your website, the actual interaction won’t be with a human even if it is in service of them.
There are many who are aghast at this idea. But it is increasingly a reality. So, it is something you should be paying attention to if you develop websites.
Here Andy Budd reflects on the implications, and it’s something we cover at our upcoming Developer Summit and Next conferences from both a developer and more of a product design and product management perspective.
And if it’s interesting to you, I highly recommend you check out the upcoming book by Katja Forbes, who is speaking at both those conferences.
