Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents
The World Wide Web was built on an assumption held for three decades: the primary consumer of web content is a human being. This permeates every layer; its access model presumes human visitors, its economics rest on human attention, and its content targets human perception. The rapid emergence of AI agents as intermediaries between humans and web content invalidates this assumption. Yet the web resists agents through blanket blocking, CAPTCHA-based exclusion, and economic models that treat agent access as extraction rather than legitimate interaction. This paper proposes a principled redesign across three layers. At the access layer, agents acting for humans should inherit equivalent acce...
| Authors | Eranga Bandara, Ross Gore, Ravi Mukkamala et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 June 2026 |
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