Who reads web pages anymore?
Henry Kim ·
OpenAI launched Dots today. Last week it was Meta's Muse. This is the great agent revolution. Dare I say it: this is the moment internet usage changes. I've already changed. I haven't checked email in a week. I don't search the internet. I don't visit shopping sites. More than ten things run on long schedules for me, and I just do the final check. Reading, judging, remembering — that's the agent's job now. Sounds grand, but it's simple. I just stopped doing what I used to do. Going to a web page, reading the content, judging it, remembering it in my head. That is now the Stone Age way. Who goes to a web page to read anymore? There was an era of paper dictionaries. An era of flipping through encyclopedias. Humanity put all that knowledge on the internet. And now, we hand the entire internet over to agents. The internet's information is already too vast for humans to search. It will only get more hostile to humans. Then humans won't be able to use the internet without agents, and dependence on agents will only accelerate. I've worked as a marketer, always obsessing over SEO. How to make people come to me. That was my livelihood. Now it's the era of optimization for agents. Interfaces will change to be easy for agents to read, not humans. Clean structure, organized data, frictionless access. Structure that's easy for agents to understand comes before design that humans find pretty. What do you sell to something that doesn't watch ads? What do you optimize for something that doesn't click? An existential question for a marketer. The humans who raised dolmens embraced the Bronze Age. The humans who threw away paper dictionaries embraced the internet. All that's left is handing the internet over to agents. Do you still search yourself? Is your website easy for agents to read?