AI agents read your website, cite it, and buy from it. No Hacks tells you what's actually changed and whether it's worth acting on yet.
The web now has visitors who aren't human. AI agents read your website, cite it, and increasingly buy from it, acting for the people who used to visit themselves.
No Hacks is where you find out what actually changed, whether it's real, and whether your website is ready for it. The articles, weekly podcast, and newsletter stay plain and back every claim with receipts.
No Hacks
A Publication About
the Agentic Web
58
Articles
230
Episodes
Weekly
Articles + Episodes
Evergreen and reference
These articles get revised rather than archived. Start with the definitions, then the two references that track every new crawler and agentic browser as it ships.
Definition
The canonical definition, and the Machine-First Architecture frame that runs through everything else here.
Definition
The W3C standard that hands agents callable tools instead of a page to read. Default-on across Shopify storefronts and Cloudflare-fronted websites since August 2026.
Updated August 2026
Five functional categories, every verified user-agent string, and every published IP range. Revised as new crawlers ship.
Updated July 2026
Every agentic browser, automation framework, and enterprise API, from Chrome auto-browse to Claude for Chrome.
The five-part field guide
Part 01
The shift from ranking pages for people to optimising them for the agents reading on their behalf.
Part 02
How AI systems choose the sources they quote, and what makes a page one of them.
Part 03
MCP for tools, A2A for agent-to-agent work, NLWeb and AGENTS.md for discovery.
Part 04
The accessibility tree, semantic HTML, and why a page that looks fine to you can be unreadable to an agent.
Part 05
ACP, UCP, payment rails, and how an agent completes a purchase without ever loading your checkout page.
New articles, the latest podcast episode, and a few links worth keeping. Practical strategies for making your website work for AI agents and the humans using it.
A reference to what each website access control is worth in court. robots.txt, terms of service, anti-bot systems, rate limits, login gates, and cease-and-desist letters, with what courts have actually held about each one and how settled each answer is, which tells you how much weight it carries.
Cloudflare launched Kitesurf, a browser for AI agents that treats rendering as optional: "visual perfection, smooth 60-fps scrolling is not" important. Four weeks earlier OpenAI retired Atlas, a browser built so a person could watch an agent work. Anything your website communicates only in painted pixels, the trust badges and the reassurances, is now definitively invisible to the visitor reading you.
Cloudflare's CFO told analysts that non-human traffic could be 1,000 times human traffic within five years and that humans will be "a rounding error on the internet." So I looked at my own crawler logs. The single largest AI crawler on nohacks.co arrived under Common Crawl's name and spent the day asking for my SSH keys, my .env files, and my MCP config.
Shopify switched on WebMCP for every Liquid storefront on August 5: catalog, cart, and checkout are now tools an AI agent can call, with nothing to install. I checked three real storefronts: search already returns products and prices in a stock Chrome, checkout dies on an internal error, and no agent is calling any of it. Why this is not another llms.txt, and what to test before the agents arrive.
The Ninth Circuit overturned the ban on Perplexity's shopping agents accessing Amazon, the second time in a month a platform reached for an old statute to block a machine visitor and lost. The courts keep declining to hold the switch. Cloudflare's defaults will happily hold it for you, and from September 15 that comes with real consequences for search too.
The web's machine-access fight is aimed at Google: block it, license to it, sue it. Meanwhile Meta's two crawlers became the majority of AI agent traffic, sending almost nothing back, and unless you are News Corp's size, nobody is holding that meeting for you.
