For most of the web's history, websites earned value after a request (through ads, subscriptions, or return visits), but agent traffic that acts on a person's behalf, skips ads, and completes its task in a single pass leaves those downstream settlement points without value to collect.

Agent traffic hollows out the web's historic model of settling value through human attention downstream of a request, since software visits once, skips ads, and completes its task in a single pass. ✦ AI generated

Author · ByteByteGo Newsletter · 2026-08-11 · original ↗

For most of its history, websites made money after a request rather than during it. A browser asked for a page, and the server returned it at no charge. The value arrived later, once a person saw an advertisement, bought a subscription, or came back for another visit. ... An agent is software that acts on a person's behalf, which in practice means it requests a page or a data feed once, takes what it needs, and finishes in a single pass. It moves past advertisements, operates outside any subscription, and completes its task before a site has a chance to earn from that attention. ... This means that request volume climbs while revenue stays flat.

Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation