For 30 years, we’ve designed the web for human eyes and human clicks.

Now, AI agents are reading, deciding, and acting on your site – and they don’t care about your beautiful homepage, your compelling copy, or your brand story.

At NEXT25 in Hamburg this September, a panel discussion posed the question everyone’s been avoiding: What comes after the website? The answer involves a fundamental shift – from designing for humans to designing for agent experience. Here’s the thing: websites aren’t going away.

But the rules for how they work just changed completely.

We’ve heard this before

The “death of the web” prediction isn’t new. Jeffrey Zeldman has compiled a list of these claims dating back to 1997, when Wired declared browsers obsolete thanks to PointCast – a screensaver that showed news headlines.

But 1995 might have been peak pessimism. Clifford Stoll told Newsweek readers that online shopping was “baloney”. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, predicted the internet would “catastrophically collapse” in 1996. He was so confident that he promised to eat his words if he was wrong. In 1997, he did exactly that – blending his printed column and consuming it on stage.

Today’s AI fears echo this pattern. But Zeldman identifies a crucial difference: AI depends on the web it supposedly threatens.

If AI kills the web that provides the information AI sucks down, then there is no contemporary body of news and text for AI to suck down and regurgitate. It would be like a parasite that kills the host body. There are occasionally such things in nature, but mostly, life finds a way, mostly. And so will the web.

Each wave – Push, RSS, mobile apps, and now AI – gets heralded as the web’s executioner. Yet ChatGPT, with 800 million weekly active users, still operates through web interfaces.

This time feels different. Not because the web is dying, but because who’s using it is fundamentally changing.

From UX to AX: user experience meets agent experience

Mathias Biilmann of Netlify has coined a term that’s starting to gain attention: AX, or Agent Experience – “the holistic experience AI agents will have as the user of a product or platform”.

This isn’t about adding chatbot features. It’s about fundamental redesign:

Too many companies are focusing on adding shallow AI features all over their products or building yet another AI agent. We need to start focusing on AX.

Here are the practical questions you need to answer:

• Do you have clean, well-described application programming interfaces (APIs) that agents can operate?
• Is your documentation machine-ready for large language models (LLMs)?
• Can agents properly use your platform and software development kits (SDKs)?

These questions aren’t futuristic – they’re urgent. Colin Sidoti at Clerk is already making it simpler for agents to build applications that handle authentication. Nikita Shamgunov at Neon has staffed a team of AI engineers specifically to ensure their database caters to agents.

Brand-to-bot: the new reality

Brent Turner has articulated what’s actually happening: the familiar business-to-business model is fracturing into three new dimensions.

Brand-to-bot. Brands need to win over digital gatekeepers – personal agents programmed to prioritise based on price, values, trust signals, or parameters set by users. Brand campaigns or sleek slogans won’t sway agents; they’ll filter with algorithms that optimise for relevance and trust.

Bot-to-brand. Personal agents won’t simply wait for advertising or offers – they’ll initiate interactions. Booking travel. Registering for events. Purchasing services. Your infrastructure needs to recognise and respond to autonomous inbound actions generated by machines acting on behalf of humans.

Bot-to-bot. Brand systems and personal agents will transact directly – negotiating offers, validating identities, confirming preferences – all without requiring a human to step in until the final choice needs confirmation.

This isn’t marketing jargon – agents already handle business-critical roles. They provide customer support, select vendors, and negotiate deals. As Tina He observes in Every:

We built developer tools for humans but found that coding agents were increasingly parsing our documentation—writing code themselves to help with tool integration. Soon, it will be commonplace for agents to work on their own like this.

Think about what this means for your business. As Turner puts it:

Brands won’t just market to people anymore. They’ll market to the agentic systems that filter decisions for those people. Emotional storytelling alone won’t cut it.

This shift towards agent experience demands new approaches. Turner connects this to the rise of AI Visibility Optimisation (AVIO) – also known as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). In a world where AI filters decisions before they ever reach a human, traditional search engine optimisation is no longer enough. Brands must become visible, trusted, and chosen by the agents standing guard between them and their audiences.

What this means for you

The urgency is real. Ben Evans’ data shows Big Tech alone has spent ~$400bn in 2025 on AI infrastructure – more than global telecoms spend on their infrastructure. Yet the picture is complicated. Many companies have deployed AI but are still searching for meaningful impact:

“We’ve all seen lots of AI presentations now, and we’ve deployed a bunch of stuff. Is that it? What’s next?” – Fortune 100 Retailer CMO

But for early adopters, the shift is already dramatic. As Andreas Cappell from Accenture Song observed at the NEXT25 panel:

This is a trend we are seeing everywhere — we call it the great decoupling. You’re using ChatGPT all day — but only having brand contacts a few times a week.

The pattern is clear: whilst mass adoption remains uneven, power users are already living in the agent-mediated future. And designing for agent experience is no longer optional.

The bifurcated web

What’s emerging isn’t a single future but a bifurcated one. The visible web for humans will continue, evolving towards richer, more immersive experiences. But alongside it, an invisible web for agents is rapidly taking shape – one built on entirely different principles.

This aligns with the original ethos of the open web: a place where many diverse competing agents can seamlessly interact with software on behalf of their users. But it requires a fundamental shift in how you think about building digital experiences.

As the NEXT25 panel explored, we’re witnessing not the death of the web but its metamorphosis. The question isn’t whether websites will disappear – they won’t.

The question is: Will your digital presence be legible to the new readers of the web? The agents that increasingly mediate your customers’ digital interactions?

For all companies, this demands a fundamental change in mindset. Start consciously designing the agent experience for your products, or risk being replaced by tools that empower your customers to harness the exponential power of seamless collaboration with agents.

What comes next

The web that emerges from this transformation won’t be less human – it will be differently human. It will be one where our intentions are amplified through artificial intelligence, where discovery happens through dialogue, and where the boundaries between human and machine agency become increasingly fluid.

The website isn’t ending. This is just the beginning.

Picture by yellowlix/ Pixabay