The Agentic Web is _________

Anthony Katsur's “From Turing to the Agentic Web” address at last week’s IAB Tech Lab Summit was like stepping into a time machine. One that carried the audience through the internet’s hallmark moments.

I still remember when my family shared a single computer. The screech of connecting to the internet carried into every room. Dinner table conversations turned into debates over who got online and when, a daily blend of bartering and bribery. Those early growing pains make up only a small chapter in a sprawling history Katsur neatly distilled.

We’re at another clunky juncture again. The ride into the agentic web feels like go-karting. Speed, sharp turns, and the moment a new model drops, everything spins out, only to end in a whiplash stop. The track is still being built while everyone is already racing on it.

When the model underneath shifts, the agents acting for you, the tools wired to tools, the connections humming in the background need to be checked. Some of it holds and some of it snaps. Once it's all patched, it's pedal to the metal. The race is always on.

Throughout the conference I kept hearing various “the agentic web is” statements from conference goers. Some were loud and future-forward.

"The agentic web is the end of search. In two years, nobody will type a query. They delegate it."

Others were cautiously optimistic, sprinkled with a healthy dose of skepticism.

"The agentic web is a great demo. I'll get excited when an agent can be trusted with a credit card, and someone can tell me who's liable when it buys the wrong thing."

As I absorbed these assumptions, I decided to ask Claude just to see how it would answer. (Spoiler alert: it answered just as you might expect.)

The agentic web is autonomous, agent-mediated, machine-driven, goal-oriented, delegated, orchestrated, programmatic, post-click, post-search, conversational, ambient, headless, API-first, protocol-driven, interoperable, composable, self-directed, proactive, anticipatory.

An AI hands you the system’s view: accurate, exhaustive, and somehow empty. It describes how the system operates, not what it changes.

For nearly three decades everything built on the web captured, held, and sold attention. The agentic web doesn’t eliminate the system. It inserts itself between people and it.

The web remains. Websites remain. Brands remain. Commerce remains. What’s changing is who interprets them first. Search doesn't end, then. It stops being something you do and becomes something that is done for you. For the first time at scale, autonomous systems are becoming the primary reader, researcher, comparer, and recommender. And for the first time, we have the tools to converse with our data and ideas.

Unlike the web that gradually converged around a handful of dominant gateways, the agentic web is emerging through dozens of competing systems at once. OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Grok, Google, Meta, enterprise copilots, sovereign AI initiatives, vertical agents, and private models are all creating different interpretations of the same underlying internet.

The agentic web is fragmented.

One of the more limiting things we can do is try to force it into a single clean definition. I don’t think there will be just one. The existing web is being restructured not by a single agentic system, but by many. Each, with its own philosophy, strengths, and limitations. And more will emerge that we haven’t even named yet.

For decades the money lived in the gap between what you wanted and what you got, and that gap was where the ads went. Agents close the gap. Or they take it over. The middle doesn't disappear. The battle simply moves. Instead of persuading people directly, brands will increasingly compete to persuade the systems acting on their behalf.

To act as you, it must know you. Or at least build a version of you convincing enough to act in your place. Not the version a cookie sells. A living model of your preferences, habits, constraints, and trade-offs. What you'd never order. Who you shop for and what you'll spend. The flight you'd cancel, the meeting you'd dodge, the email you'd never send. It carries your card, your calendar, your voice.

When an ad missed, you scrolled past. When an agent is wrong, it's your money gone, your message sent, your name on it.

The web is bigger than ever, and for the first time, much of it will be experienced through systems acting on your behalf.

The agentic web is personal. But it comes at a cost.

An agent is only as useful as its understanding of the person it represents. To act on your behalf, it must model your judgment, preferences, quirks, and boundaries. An extraordinarily difficult task that will often fail before it succeeds.

To act for you, it needs to understand your real intent: not the awkward query you typed or the button you clicked, but the actual outcome you’re trying to achieve. Getting this right consistently will require deep personalization, frequent corrections, and unavoidable privacy trade-offs.

The agentic web is intent-driven. That intent is much harder to capture than the attention economy ever was.

For nearly three decades, the web was built around capturing attention. An ad only needed a chance to influence you. An agent needs enough understanding to stand in for you. The future of the web may no longer be defined mainly by what captures our attention, but by what best understands, and reliably acts on, our intent.