A search interface or magnifying glass, representing the shift from search to agentic action

For most of internet history, a website’s one job was to help a human find a page.

Search engines became really good at that. You typed in a query, received a ranked list, and then did the reading yourself.

Then AI search showed up as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, etc. Instead of linking you to a page, these tools read it and hand you a summary. Information in, summary out. The click that used to belong to a website now gets compressed into a paragraph generated somewhere else.

That’s the stage everyone’s talking about right now. I think it’s a warm-up.

AI agents navigate websites. They compare options across sources. They fill in forms and complete transactions, autonomously, without you ever loading the page.

Picture a parent typing this into an assistant:

“Find a swim lesson near me for a six-year-old on Saturday mornings and help me register.”

That’s close to something that already works today. If you run marketing for an organization like a YMCA, that one sentence is worth sitting with, because of everything packed into it.

For an agent to handle this correctly, it has to figure out:

  • Which location actually offers swim lessons
  • Which class fits a six-year-old (could be “youth,” or “ages 5-12,”)
  • Which sessions land on Saturday morning, and whether there’s actual availability
  • What eligibility applies: membership status, prerequisite skill level, guardian consent
  • Whether the agent can complete registration itself or only start it

Every one of those depends on how clearly an organization’s program, schedule, and eligibility data is structured. That varies a lot across YMCAs today, and most of it was built for a person to scroll through, not a machine to parse.

The marketing question used to be simple: can a parent find a YMCA’s swim lesson page?

Now add this: can an AI system correctly identify the right location, the right class, the right schedule, the right eligibility, and get that parent to registration?

An agent won’t figure out a messy page the way a patient human visitor might. If the age range is buried in a PDF, it stays buried. If three locations describe the same program three different ways, the agent has to guess which one is right, and it might guess wrong.

Ranking well in search results still matters. Being legible to a system that reads your site once, fast, with zero patience for ambiguity, is a newer discipline, and most organizations haven’t started building for it yet.

This is the first post in a series I’m writing on exactly that: what agents need from a website, which fundamentals still matter, how to make program and location data machine-readable, and where this is all heading as agents move from reading pages to acting on them.

Search engines helped people find a page. Agents might soon finish the task the page existed for.