Exploring the Current Status of the Agentic Web
The digital landscape is undergoing a significant transformation, as indicated by the State of the Bots report from TollBit. The traditional web's economic model appears to be on its deathbed, giving way to a new digital economy powered by the Agentic Web.
This shift is driven by the rise of agentic AI systems, a fundamentally different technology from search engines. Unlike search engines that distribute attention, AI systems consume information to produce intelligence. One striking example is Googlebot, where AI bot traffic now represents 30.55% of its volume and is growing at an unprecedented 87% quarter-over-quarter. However, the referral traffic from these systems has decreased as a percentage of total traffic. AI applications drive only 0.04% of referral traffic back to publishers, making them comparable to farmers waiting for locusts to pollinate their crops.
The Agentic Web refers to the emergent internet ecosystem where autonomous AI agents, powered by agentic AI systems, actively perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with web services independently. These agents can operate across specialized domains, using perception, reasoning, learning, and orchestration to deliver outcomes directly on behalf of users or organizations.
The impact of the Agentic Web on the traditional web's economic model is profound. It shifts from passive consumption to active automation, transforming value chains, and creating new monetization streams and business models.
With the Agentic Web, workflows that once required human interaction are automated, reducing the need for constant human input and enabling more efficient, outcome-driven services. This automation has the potential to disintermediate traditional service providers, changing who captures economic value on the web.
The Agentic Web also fosters decentralized agent ecosystems, with agentic AI systems often operating as networks of collaborating agents. This decentralization could lead to interoperable economic models on the web, reducing reliance on centralized platforms and reshaping web governance and profit distribution.
In conclusion, the Agentic Web represents a new paradigm where autonomous AI agents actively perform tasks and make decisions online. This shift fundamentally disrupts the traditional web's economic model by automating workflows, enabling new value chains, and fostering decentralized agent ecosystems that shift economic power and monetization strategies away from conventional human-centric and content-driven frameworks.
References:
- The Agentic Web Visibility Playbook
- The Multi-Layered Architecture of the Agentic Web
- Claude Agent Is Coming To Eat The Agentic Web
- The Agentic Web Tutorial
- The Architecture of The Agentic Web
- Agentic AI
- Google's Agentic AI Revolution
- The Agentic Web
- OpenAI
- Perplexity
- The rise of artificial-intelligence (AI) systems, such as Google's Agentic AI, is contributing to the shift on the digital landscape toward the Agentic Web, a new ecosystem where AI agents autonomously perform tasks and make decisions, potentially disrupting traditional business models and fostering decentralized agent ecosystems (The Agentic Web Visibility Playbook).
- The growth of AI models, including those powering the Agentic Web, is shaping the future of the digital economy, presenting opportunities for businesses to employ technology and artificial-intelligence strategies to adapt and thrive in this evolving landscape (The Multi-Layered Architecture of the Agentic Web).
