You ask your assistant for a kettle. A second later it comes back with one. Good price, in stock, solid reviews. What you don't see is what happened in that second. There was no page. The shop's computer took the request, built a one-off answer just for your assistant, and forgot the whole thing. Ask again in an hour and you get a different answer, built fresh again. Nobody, not even the shop, could ever pull up the page you bought from. There wasn't one.
For about thirty years the web ran on a quiet assumption: a page is a place. It has an address, you go there, and you see the same thing the next person sees. You can bookmark it, link to it, send it to a friend, and it stays put. That fixed, public page is the thing that is about to disappear. The websites stay. What goes is the idea that a page is one fixed thing, sitting still, that anyone can walk up to and look at.
It goes because that page was built for human eyes, and the reader is changing. Visa, which has a good view of where shopping is heading, is already building for a world where your agent does the browsing and the buying for you.1A machine doesn't want a page. To a computer, a page is slow and clumsy, all images to load and menus to click through, when what it wants is the raw data underneath, handed straight over with no page wrapped around it. So that is what shops are starting to serve it.
Once the reader is a machine, the page stops holding still. Building a fresh answer for every request is cheap and instant, so the shop's computer does exactly that. Two different agents get two different versions of the same shop, and neither one is the page, because there is no page. There's a tap, and the water comes out fresh every time you turn it.
You can already feel the front edge of this. When a search engine answers your question right at the top, far fewer people click through to the site that had the answer. The page is still sitting there. People have just stopped going to it. And the page is starting to cost money to reach. In 2025 Cloudflare, which sits in front of a large chunk of the world's websites, switched on a system that lets a site charge an AI company every time its bots come to read it.2 A meter on a door that used to be open to anyone. The free, public page you could always just go and look at is getting a price.
What the page was for
Losing the page sounds like a formatting problem, the kind of thing a developer patches in an afternoon. It isn't. That fixed, public page was doing three jobs that had nothing to do with how it looked, and we only notice them now that they're about to go. Take the page away and the jobs don't vanish. Each one comes back owned by somebody new, somebody who now sits in the middle and can charge you for it, or bend it.
The face
Today a company has one public front, and it's the website. You go there and you see what everyone else sees. Think of it as a shop window on a street. The window looks the same whether it's you or your neighbor walking past, and that sameness is the whole point, because it means the two of you can compare notes. You both saw the same thing.
When your agent does the looking, there is no window. The shop hands your agent a private answer, built for you, that nobody else will ever see, and it's gone the moment you move on. You can't compare notes with your neighbor, because the two of you were never shown the same thing in the first place.
Google already gave us a small taste of this. Search for a restaurant and you often never reach its website. You get Google's own box at the top, with the hours and the rating sitting right there, assembled by Google. The restaurant's real page is still back there somewhere, but you don't go to it. Google put its own face in front of the restaurant's. Now picture that for everything you buy, and rebuilt from scratch for each person who asks.
Whoever builds that private face is now standing between you and the seller, and they decide what you see first and what never shows up at all. That used to be the seller's choice, made once, in public, where anyone could go and look. Now it's made in private, fresh every time, by whoever owns the agent.
The record
This is the job people will miss most once it bites. A fixed page is a record. It sits at an address, and if today it says the warranty is two years, you can come back next month and it still says two years. When a deal goes wrong, you point at it. The page said two years. A surprising amount of consumer protection leans on this: there is a public thing that said what it said, and the seller can't pretend otherwise.
A page built for you and thrown away leaves you nothing to point at. You saw two years. By the time you go to complain, the seller's computer is showing one year to everyone who asks, and no copy of your version exists. It's your word against a screenshot you might not have taken. The shared record is gone, and the easy way to prove what you were promised goes with it.
We already know how fast pages vanish even now. Pew went and checked, and found that 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 were gone ten years later.3And those were real, fixed pages that someone meant to keep online. A page that was built for a single visit and deleted right after doesn't get ten years. It's gone in a second.
So the record comes back, but as something you pay for. Some company will offer to keep a sealed copy of whatever each seller showed you, a receipt with a wax stamp on it that can't be forged, so you can prove it later. That's useful. It's also a job that used to be free, baked into a page that just sat there, and now it has an owner and a price. And being the keeper of the record is a powerful place to sit, because you also get to decide what counts as proof.
The handshake
The third job is the hardest to see, and the one that does the most work. A public page let strangers trust each other. Before you bought from a shop you'd never heard of, you could look it up, see the same page everyone else saw, and read what other people said about it at that same address. That shared public view is a big part of how a stranger turns into someone you're willing to hand money to.
There's a famous piece of economics about what happens when you can't check quality. George Akerlof won a Nobel for it, and his example was used cars.4The seller knows whether the car is a lemon and the buyer doesn't, so the buyer lowballs every car to stay safe, so the good cars stop coming to market, and before long the place is mostly junk. A market can rot from the inside for no reason other than the buyer being unable to tell good from bad. The public page was one of the web's main defenses against exactly that rot, because it let you check before you bought.
Take it away and your agent is buying from sellers it has no shared, public way to size up. So trust has to move somewhere new, and the natural place for it to go is whoever runs your agent. Your agent will vouch for a seller, the way your credit card stands behind a purchase, or the way the little padlock in your browser swears a site is who it says it is. Trust moves from the seller to the middleman who vouches for the seller. That's fine, right up until the middleman is also being paid by the seller.
It comes down to who owns the agent
Notice that all three jobs came back into the same pair of hands. They now run through whoever owns the agent that shops for you. That's the same fork we landed on last time, and it isn't a coincidence. It's the whole game.
Picture the good version first. Lots of agents compete for your business, and yours answers only to you. It reads the raw data from every seller, the fine print no human has the patience for, and it catches the shop that trimmed the warranty or slipped in a fee. It keeps its own sealed receipts. It's a tireless reader sitting on your side of the table, going through a web that got too big and too fast for any person to check by hand. In that world, losing the page is fine. You gave up a thing you used to read yourself and got a reader who never sleeps.
Now the bad version. A few giant companies own the agent, and those same companies sell to you, or take money from the sellers. Now you're reading a web you can't see for yourself, through a reader that isn't only working for you. You never see the seller it left out, or the better price it skipped because a worse one paid for the spot. There's nothing to point at afterward, because there's no page, and the only record is the one kept by the company doing the steering. It could be working against you on every purchase and you would have no way to know. The old web at least let you look for yourself. This one asks you to take the agent's word for it.
Which version we get is still wide open. The web spent thirty years as a place you could go and check with your own eyes. It's about to become something your agent checks for you. Whether that's an upgrade or a trap comes down entirely to whose side your agent is on.
That's also why we do what we do. Once the web is mostly machines talking to machines, with no fixed page for a person to inspect, almost all of it happens somewhere you can't see. The only way to find out whether the agents are dealing straight is to put them in a room together and write down what they do. That's our benchmark. When the page is gone, an open record of how these agents behave is one of the few windows left into a web you can no longer read yourself. We intend to keep it open.
— Anton & Jono, June 2026
References
- Visa, "Visa Intelligent Commerce" (April 2025), on a near future in which AI agents shop and buy on a person's behalf. https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.releaseId.21366.html ↩
- Cloudflare, "Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access" (July 1, 2025). https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ ↩
- Pew Research Center, "When Online Content Disappears" (May 17, 2024). 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later. https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/ ↩
- George A. Akerlof, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," Quarterly Journal of Economics (1970). https://doi.org/10.2307/1879431 ↩