HOW AI IS CHANGING THE INTERNET: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE POINTLESS
Nobody asked us if we wanted it changed. So every week I check what's actually happening, and what to do about it.
Most of it comes down to what happens when AI acts for your customers: how it finds, chooses and buys from a business, on your website and everywhere else.
Paste one product page. The free check follows the route an AI shopping agent takes: whether it can find the product, understand what it is and what it costs, and buy it. The results arrive in seconds, with a copy by email.
I talked to Amanda Natividad, the person who named zero-click marketing, the week her book with Rand Fishkin came out, and wanted to ask one question: if nobody clicks any more, what is my website for? Her answer is that it matters more than ever, and in a different way(s). It is your source of truth, the record everything else points to. Along the...
OpenAI's new agents, dots, are fuzzy balls with eyes that you name and dress. They also sign into websites with your saved passwords and read the email you connect. I went through OpenAI's pages to see what the face is covering. What a dot reads can train the model unless you find the switch, and websites are told nothing. I would not give one my l...
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's AI agent, Muse, needs to be discreet. The same month, some of the calls it made to businesses were placed by people in a call center. I went through what he told Joanna Stern and Alex Heath about Muse's privacy and security and sorted every claim by tense. What exists today, only Meta has checked. The protection from Met...
A hundred and seventy-two companies have put their name to A2A, the standard for AI agents at different companies to find each other and talk. I took the web address the project lists next to each name and asked 135 of them the question the standard is built around. Four answered. The reason is not technical: MCP needs one person to say yes, A2A ne...
A magazine put a paywall in front of its journalism to stop AI reading it. I tested what that paywall actually checks. It reads one line of your request, the name you type in yourself, and compares it against a list. Say who you are and you get a bill. Make something up and you walk straight in. Then I asked two assistants to read the article anywa...
On August 5 Shopify switched on a second way into every store on its platform, built for AI agents instead of people. Nothing to install, no merchant asked. I opened three unrelated stores, Allbirds, Brooklinen and Partake Foods, and asked each what it could do for a machine. All three answered with the same roughly 800 words, identical character f...
People are starting to send AI agents to shop, book and bank for them. JPMorgan Chase blocks them, Bank of America says whatever an agent does with your login is on you, and Walmart is about to give each agent a separate profile with a spending limit. A business should see both the agent and the customer who sent it.
Shopify pays the company behind an AI shopping agent a commission on the promoted products it sends shoppers to buy, and stores running Shop Campaigns can now add to it. The extra commission pays only when the shopper buys in Shop, Shopify's app and website, so the agent has a reason to work for its developer and for Shopify as well as the shopper.
I gave three Claude models the same saved list of 20 products from Shopify's catalog, the same instruction and the same shopper's request, almost 2,000 times. They agreed on the top pick in none of six searches. Haiku and Sonnet often picked the product with the most reviews, and Opus called its pick "safe" in 222 of 300.
Google's Universal Cart went live in the US on 15 October 2026. The saving, the comparing and the price alerts happen inside Google, and the store hears about its shopper when the cart is handed over or the shopper starts to pay. Every Shopify store I could check already declares the cart capability Google asks for. Google publishes no usage numbers.
Google and OpenAI now both build answers as interfaces, and five months after I/O neither has shown a website's data inside one. I think the direction still holds, and the decision it would force on a business looks like the one hotels made with booking.com.
I ran 1,305 searches against Shopify Catalog, the product search AI shopping agents use through the Universal Commerce Protocol, all but one at least twice. Products with more reviews came back higher in 78 of 91 searches that returned 50 products. What the shopper told the agent about themselves, in the field Shopify built for it, changed nothing measurable.
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