Internal APIs Are All You Need: Shadow APIs, Shared Discovery, and the Case Against Browser-First Agent Architectures
Autonomous agents increasingly interact with the web, yet most websites remain designed for human browsers -- a fundamental mismatch that the emerging ``Agentic Web'' must resolve. Agents must repeatedly browse pages, inspect DOMs, and reverse-engineer callable routes -- a process that is slow, brittle, and redundantly repeated across agents. We observe that every modern website already exposes internal APIs (sometimes called \emph{shadow APIs}) behind its user interface -- first-party endpoints that power the site's own functionality. We present Unbrowse, a shared route graph that transforms browser-based route discovery into a collectively maintained index of these callable first-party ...
| Authors | Lewis Tham, Nicholas Mac Gregor Garcia, Jungpil Hahn |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.ET |
| Published | 1 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 April 2026 |
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