Making the internet better for AI agents could make it worse for everyone else. This balance is now breaking down. But personal AI agents that perform tasks such as booking flights or hotels on behalf of users are disrupting this order. Agents are now becoming widespread. With OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse apps, these agents entered mass use, and Muse was downloaded 5 million times in its first month. Agent-driven web traffic also tripled from August to September.
Agents do not fit into this category. They operate at machine speed, but because they carry out legitimate tasks on behalf of individuals, they are not classified as human or bot. The rules do not account for this difference. Because they do not conform to this distinction, some platforms have banned them entirely. TechCrunch reported problems on many sites from Pizza Hut to Yelp, and Yelp does not allow AI to make restaurant reservations. Amazon blocked Muse agents and also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity. Although the judge ruled in favor of Perplexity, Amazon appealed, arguing that agents threaten its advertising business by making it harder to distinguish between ads shown to humans and those shown to bots.
This prediction is far-reaching. Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, predicts in an assessment he wrote on LinkedIn that this situation will soon affect the entire web. Customer service will become more difficult. Agents sent to request refunds or negotiate prices will make customer service unusable for humans, and users whose agents are blocked will become increasingly frustrated.
Because a large portion of agent traffic goes to e-commerce sites, there is a strong commercial rationale for platforms to open their doors to agents. Shopify, too, is opening dedicated paths for agents. Shopify offers agents dedicated checkout lines that bypass pages designed for humans. The real question is what the internet will become for people. If the web is shaped around agents that will outnumber us, it could become more exhausting for the people left behind.
Why it matters
The issue is not merely a matter of a few applications becoming widespread; the internet’s traffic rules were written for two categories — humans and bots — and because agents do not fit into this duality, the fundamental distinction that sites have used for years is becoming ineffective. That is why this development concerns not only technology companies but also all platforms that rely on advertising revenue, e-commerce sites, and everyone doing business online. Amazon’s appeal and Shopify’s opening of dedicated checkout lines for agents show that the sector is being pulled in two opposite directions, and which approach becomes the standard will shape the web’s architecture. For the average user, the picture is two-sided: while agents make everyday tasks easier, customer service and support channels could become more difficult for humans. The outcome of the appeal and the stance that major platforms will take leave the question of whom the internet will be designed for going forward unanswered for now.
Term: agent
An AI agent is software that, rather than producing a single response, calls tools and carries out multi-step tasks to achieve a goal.