The Agentic Web

We’re witnessing the end of the internet as we know it. Not its death, but its metamorphosis into something fundamentally different.

The economic model that has powered the web for three decades, monetizing human attention through advertising, is collapsing.

In its place, a radically new ecosystem is emerging, where AI agents, rather than humans, are the primary consumers of content.

This isn’t a gradual evolution. It’s a phase change. And it’s happening right now.

The Great Unbundling of Human Attention

For 30 years, the internet’s business model has been elegantly simple: create content that attracts human eyeballs, then sell those eyeballs to advertisers. Google perfected this model, building a trillion-dollar empire on the premise that human attention could be efficiently harvested and monetized at scale.

But something extraordinary is happening.

Bots now account for 80% of all web traffic. Only one in five visitors to websites today is actually human. Even more striking, OpenAI’s GPT bots now generate 13% of all web traffic, while Google’s own crawlers have dropped to just 8%. We’re watching, in real-time, the transition from human-centric consumption to machine-dominated data extraction.

The implications are staggering.

Since Google launched AI Overviews in May 2024, the percentage of searches resulting in zero click-throughs to publisher websites has grown from 56% to 69%. Publishers are watching their traffic—and with it, their entire business model—evaporate into the ether of AI-generated summaries.

The Cloudflare Moment: HTTP 402 Finally Gets Its Purpose

In a move that history may mark as the internet’s economic turning point, Cloudflare launched “Pay Per Crawl” in early 2025, creating the first infrastructure-level response to AI’s voracious appetite for data. The elegance of their solution lies in its simplicity: when an AI crawler requests content, websites can now respond with HTTP 402 “Payment Required”—a status code that has existed since the early days of the web but never found its true purpose until now.

Here’s how the new economy works: AI agents approach websites not as passive browsers but as active purchasers. The site names its price. The agent evaluates whether the data is worth the cost. If yes, it pays and receives the content. If no, it moves on. No human ever sees an ad. No attention is monetized. Pure data-for-value exchange.

This represents more than a new payment mechanism. It’s a complete inversion of the logic of the attention economy. Instead of interrupting humans with unwanted advertising, we’re moving toward a model where AI agents efficiently purchase exactly the data they need to complete specific tasks.

The New KPIs: From Impressions to Outcomes

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