The manifest

Who is a big topic of discussion, and it can be difficult to define depending on how you look at it. AI agents now drive more of the internet's traffic than ever before, and that shift has come much faster than was anticipated. Industry leaders are signalling that the pace of progress is too fast and must be duly considered. From the outside it is hard to fathom exactly how AI will disrupt our lives and businesses, or where the impacts will be felt most in the near and long term. What we can do is prepare as best we can by being proactive and optimistic about the future to come.

We believe in the evolution of the web from human-centric to agent-centric, in what Cloudflare calls the open Agentic Internet. Organisations like Cloudflare, Vercel, Google, Shopify and Stripe are leading the charge in building and adopting the standards and protocols that will give the web's new visitor the rails it needs to act as a first-class citizen. We closely follow the adoption of emerging protocols such as WebMCP, which was recently given support in OpenAI's Codex, and UCP, which ships natively in Shopify stores.

Our research is focused on how AI agents perceive and act on your website, from being cited in an answer to completing a booking. Part of this is what the industry calls Answer Engine Optimisation, but agents now do more than answer, so we study the whole journey, starting with travel and hospitality. Most of what we publish is primary research: experiments we design and run ourselves, with methods written so anyone can rerun them. Those results are our evidence for which changes actually make a brand "Agent Ready", and they drive the products we build.

We are not the only lab doing this work, and we owe a debt to the research that has set the bar for the field. By measuring how agents actually read the web, it moved the conversation from opinion to evidence. It also produced the AgentReady standard, built in collaboration with Vercel, Mintlify, Auth0 and Stripe, and is-agentic.com with Vercel. We build on that standard rather than beside it, and our contribution is extending it to travel, where the guest, the property and the booking engine are often three different parties.

Human written, Nicholas Varley