Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else

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Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people. Websites have long allowed bots to perform automated tasks, like capturing the content of web pages, but rules govern what they can access and how they behave. The web, after all, is designed primarily for people, even if we occasionally have to solve puzzles and captchas to prove we are not bots.

But this is being entirely upended by the release of personal AI agents, which can do things for you online, like booking flights or hotel rooms. They have recently been unleashed at scale by the launch of apps like OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse. Muse was downloaded 5 million times in its first month, and agentic web traffic tripled from August to September.

The mingling of these agents with human visitors—on an internet designed largely to prioritize people—has gone poorly, with many websites blocking AI agents that consumers have sent to negotiate prices or plan vacations. Still, if the demand for agents keeps going up, the internet will be increasingly redesigned for them instead of us.

Such changes are coming because agents really do mark a third category of web visitor. They’re not humans, of course, and they use the internet at machine speed. But they’re not quite bots, either, because they’re acting on behalf of individual people to do tasks that can be perfectly legitimate and useful. They just work faster than a person would.

Since agents don’t fit into the systems we have for differentiating bots from people, some platforms (especially the more security-conscious ones) have opted to just ban them entirely. TechCrunch recently reported people having trouble deploying their agents to websites ranging from Pizza Hut to Yelp, which doesn’t allow AI to book restaurant reservations. Amazon has blocked Muse’s agents and is waging a court battle against the AI startup Perplexity to block its agents too. Though a judge recently ruled in favor of Perplexity, Amazon has filed an appeal in which it argues that AI agents threaten its advertising business by making it harder to distinguish between ads seen by humans and those served to bots.

These blocks are annoying for early adopters, but Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, predicts it will soon affect the whole web. Once it becomes common knowledge that AI agents can be sent to request refunds or negotiate prices, for example, agents will overwhelm customer service departments to the point where they become unusable by real people. “Humans will eventually get very annoyed when their agents aren’t allowed to do this on their behalf,” he recently wrote on LinkedIn.

If demand for personal agents grows, platforms will find ways to let them in. That’s especially true because the vast majority of agentic web traffic is to e-commerce sites, meaning that platforms have money to be made if they allow the legions of new AI agents to shop on behalf of real people. Indeed, the e-commerce giant Shopify is already welcoming the agents by giving them their own checkout lanes that bypass pages designed for humans.

The pressing question is what will happen to the internet for the rest of us in the process. We’ve grown used to a web where, even as it’s increasingly designed to exploit our attention, humans have at least remained the intended users. But that internet might yield to one optimized instead for the agents that will eventually outnumber us, making it even more miserable for the humans who are left.

How might this go? Perhaps websites become increasingly neglected as destinations for real people. Humans who want to browse and compare products themselves encounter worse interfaces. Verification systems are imperfect; imagine constantly being asked to verify that you’re a human, not an agent (and hey, maybe you’ll need to get your iris scanned to do so). That sweater you want doesn’t have one price listed for everyone but instead displays different prices to different people’s agents. You can never tell when your agent’s recommendation is influenced by advertisements or platform commissions.

That’s a far cry from the future promised by Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, in which AI agents will give consumers greater power and bargaining leverage. But that promise is not outlandish. Agents are capable of genuinely helping people by fighting bogus medical bills or researching more affordable car insurance, for example.

Whether they can actually be used for these purposes depends on what rules are set for how agents interact with websites and what exactly they’re allowed to do.

These rules are still being written. Some of them will benefit all of us—neither consumers nor businesses want credit card information to be waved around by agents wherever they roam the web, for example, and rules to keep agents more secure are a good thing. It’s the more contested ones, like whether businesses can block agents from their websites or prevent them from negotiating better deals for consumers, that will determine whether the web becomes a highway for agents working for us or against us.