Marketing edition
Agents visit your website, ChatGPT shows ads in 89 countries, and Google and Meta change their terms.
Your website gets a third kind of visitor: the AI agent
Until now, the internet had two kinds of visitors: people and bots. Now a third kind is arriving: personal AI agents. They do things online for someone, such as booking a flight or hotel. Apps like Dots from OpenAI and Muse from Meta have released them on a large scale. Muse was downloaded 5 million times in its first month. Agent traffic on the web tripled from August to September.
Many websites keep agents out. Yelp does not allow AI to make restaurant reservations. Amazon blocks Muse's agents and is suing the AI company Perplexity. A judge recently ruled in Perplexity's favor, but Amazon appealed. Amazon says agents threaten its advertising business, because it gets harder to separate ads seen by people from ads seen by bots.
Most agents visit web shops, so there is money to be made there. Shopify therefore already gives agents their own checkout lanes, which skip the pages meant for people.
The writer fears the web will get worse for people. He mentions worse websites, more and more proof that you are human, and different prices for different agents. You also can't know whether ads influence your agent's advice. Professor Ethan Mollick expects agents to flood customer service so much that people can no longer get through.
Agents can also really help people, for example with unfair medical bills or a cheaper car insurance. Whether that works depends on rules that are still being written. The question is whether companies may block agents or let them negotiate.
Background for subscribersAgree with your web team what counts as a successful visit for you, now that a visit of a fraction of a second can also be a success. Write it down before you decide whether to block agents or give them their own route, because then you also know what you are measuring. That way you can explain later why a low number of seconds on a page is not automatically a bad number.
A successful visit can last a millisecond
Jasper Boot writes in an opinion piece that many customers let a bot do their searching. He noticed this himself with ChatGPT's voice mode. The bot visits your website on behalf of the customer, reads the information and gives advice. The customer then no longer visits your site. This distorts your statistics. An agent doesn't need four minutes. It reads the page very fast and leaves. Your report then shows a session duration of almost zero seconds and a high bounce rate, even though it may have found exactly what it was looking for. According to Boot, an agent has no use for mood videos, a nice button color or a beautiful brand story. It looks for overview and accessible data. Is your stock status in a slow, interactive module, or your price behind a required contact form? Then it gets stuck and the purchase goes to a competitor. His advice: look at your KPIs differently, win people over with a good story and help the machine with clear information.
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