I was reading an investor update after the big sell-off on The Motley Fool when David Kretzmann’s piece triggered more than just questions about my portfolio. His piece was about companies positioning themselves for AI-driven commerce. Investors looking at businesses that are preparing for a world where not humans, but AI agents browse, compare, and purchase.
OpenClaw/Moltbot/ClawedBot might be the best example we have right now of an AI Agent that can act autonomously on your behalf (even without asking for permission in critical decisions). But I’m getting ahead of myself, because the spark of hope the article provoked was the following:
If companies are optimizing for their web exposure for AI agents …
who is the internet actually built for now?
According to the Dead Internet Theory most of the internet is no longer genuinely human. It’s bots generating content, optimizing engagement loops, sometimes simulating activity all while humans become predictable endpoints to consume.
Look at the incentives.
If ad revenue scales with engagement…
If engagement scales with volume…
If AI can generate volume infinitely…
Then of course the web fills with synthetic sludge. From AI-written articles, SEO farms, engagement bait, comment bots to algorithmically amplified outrage.
The incentives demand it.
The “human internet” already died somewhere along the way, but the same incentives that killed it might now revive it.
The battlefield in the Attention Economy is changing
The modern internet was designed around human weakness. Clickbait works because humans are impulsive; Dark patterns work because humans are distractible. Urgency triggers work due to FOMO.
The system is optimized for dopamine hits.
Human ā Click ā Ad ā Conversion.
But agentic AI changes that!
We’re no longer just talking about asking ChatGPT questions. We’re talking about AI systems that can browse autonomously, compare products, execute transactions and use external tools. AI systems like AutoGPT, and in more extreme form, systems like OpenClaw.
Important sidenote: AI agents are not immune to manipulation.
Again, OpenClaw has plenty of examples online. The one I would like to highlight followed clickbait-style structures as it purchased a course from entrepreneur Alex Hormozi (who teaches that stuff) based on the reasoning:
“After analyzing 3 Alex Hormozi clips, the ROI math checks out. You’ll 10x that investment in 90 days…”
So no, machines are not magically rational, but they are manipulable in a different way. Where Humans respond more to emotional architecture, Agents respond more to structural architecture. This changes the battlefield in the attention economy.
SEO Is Dying. GEO Is Taking Over.
This is already visible. Sure, traditional SEO is not dead yet, but more and more effort is being put into Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). You want to appear with your company in the AI generated summary, not simply at the top of Google.
This means Companies now optimize for:
The Web is slowly becoming less about persuasion design and more about protocol design.
Because if AI agents become major economic actors…. if they make purchasing decisions on our behalf… then companies won’t optimize for our eyeballs.
They’ll optimize for machine legibility, which demands more structure, even LLM-based AI agents. Google also recognizes this introducing their WebMCP, a new interface that brings the Model Context Protocol concept to the web, allowing AI agents to interact with websites in a structured way.
At this point you might be wondering where exactly is that spark of hope, because so far this sounds like even more evidence for the Dead Internet Theory.
There is no ONE internet
We assume “the internet” is this Anglo-American space: English content, U.S.-based platforms and Silicon Valley logic.
In talks with friends, we’ve speculated that India alone has hundreds of millions of internet users, with many more coming online. By sheer numbers, you would expect that kind of scale to visibly shift internet culture. And yet, from where we sit, it largely hasn’t.
We forget that there is a big Hispanic/Latin internet, a Russian internet and many more. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, we simply don’t interact with it. So, when we talk about the internet “changing,” we’re often just talking about our own bubble shifting, not the entire network.
Now add AI agents to that picture. We already have MoltBook, essentially a Reddit for OpenClaw AI agents. That could be the beginning of another layer forming, not necessarily visible to us, but economically relevant.
We see agents already becoming partners in financial decisions. That raises a more important question: where are the value gaps left open to be exploited, and where will companies choose to place their ads? Keep in mind that money can only be spent once.
The moment the agent layer becomes economically dominant, that’s where the real shift
The Paradoxical Conlusion
It might feel like a paradox, but the conclusion is simple: ads, clickbait and dopamine hacks get less powerful once there’s an agentic AI internet sitting next to ours, because companies will start optimizing for the attention and decision-making of AI agents instead of only for human impulse.
That doesn’t mean manipulation disappears, it means the primary target changes. If agents begin to mediate a meaningful share of transactions, companies will increasingly compete for visibility, integration and influence within that agentic layer. Advertising budgets, optimization efforts and strategic design will follow wherever economic leverage accumulates.
It will take time to get there, and in the meantime the internet will probably feel more “dead” than “alive.” Most importantly, there is hope in the idea that the easiest path to growth is no longer simply “make the human click,” because more and more economic value will flow through the agentic layer instead.
Resouces:
https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/indian-internet-user-base-crosses-950-million-in-2025-iamai-report-126012901048_1.html
https://www.moltbook.com/
https://the-decoder.com/googles-webmcp-moves-the-web-closer-to-becoming-a-structured-database-for-ai-agents/
My clawdbot just signed up for a $2,997 "build your personal brand" mastermind after watching 3 Alex Hormozi clips.
byu/HuckleberryEntire699 inVibeCodeCamp
