Turns out the shopper you’ve been optimizing for has a VM, a wallet, and no impulse control problems… Unlike some of our Crew.
Meta just gave a billion people a buyer’s agent, Muse. And Muse doesn’t answer questions, it does the work: opens a browser, fills forms, negotiates, then checks out with Stripe’s Link.
Cha-ching?
It’s the first agent covered by Link’s purchase protections, using one-time-use cards. Shop Pay comes next.
And the traffic is already here: Bots and agents now make up over half of all web requests, Digiday reports via Cloudflare.
DTC brand Mellow Sleep says AI-assistant traffic converts several times better than site average. Meanwhile, one agency’s clients saw bot traffic up 80% YoY, poisoning retargeting pools until CPMs rose 20%.
So classify your traffic. Don’t block it.
That’s not the only way AI is reshaping the web.
Search wants the follow-up, not the click: Bing is testing an “Ask follow-up” box in Copilot results that keeps users in the Bing tab.
Google’s AI Mode is going further, testing table-format follow-up questions and paginated answers with a skip button. It’s running the qualifying interview your landing page used to.
Meanwhile, credit gets thinner: Google is testing smaller link cards in AI Overviews and AI Mode, with the site description removed entirely. More citations, less context each.
The buyer is changing, and the way humans see your website recommended is changing too. A marketer’s work never ends, does it?
