Same window. Three architectures. The timing isn't coincidence. It's convergence.
The human web was never designed for machines. Every page is a visual document: layout, color, typography, spatial hierarchy. Optimized for a pair of eyes and a pointing finger.
Agents today still have to reverse-engineer UI meant for humans: scraping screenshots, guessing at DOM structure, parsing street signs they were never meant to read.
We've been building bridges for decades. Each one got us a little further.
"Each one taught machines a little more about us. WebMCP is the first to let us teach them what we do."
Parallel helps agents find. Cloudflare helps agents read. WebMCP helps agents act.
Different layers, same bifurcation: one web for humans, another for machines. Running in parallel on the same infrastructure.
"These are not competing. They are opposite ends of the same future stack."
These three didn't coordinate. They converged independently on the same thesis: the web needs a machine-readable layer that doesn't exist yet. Discovery, content, execution. Three companies, three layers, one architectural shift.
Based on the W3C draft spec. API surface may evolve during early preview.
Today, agents reverse-engineer the UI. Tomorrow, sites expose intent directly. Move your cursor across to peel back the human layer.
Cloudflare's own blog. Same content, radically different cost.
Standards don't land overnight. They creep, stall, and sometimes never arrive. The pattern depends less on engineering elegance and more on whether someone creates a reason to care.
WCAG relied on moral pressure and sporadic lawsuits. Schema worked where Google rewarded it, was ignored elsewhere. GDPR moved faster because the penalties were real.
WebMCP has no ranking carrot and no regulatory stick. So what drives adoption?
Schema.org succeeded because Google made it worth doing. Implement structured data, get rich snippets, get more clicks. A clean incentive loop.
WebMCP doesn't have that loop. There's no search engine promising better rankings for sites that expose tools to agents. So why would anyone bother?
The moment agents become a real acquisition channel, sites won't want scrapers guessing their checkout flow. A misread button label or a stale DOM selector means a lost sale. Structured action definitions eliminate that ambiguity.
A booking site doesn't care if a human or an agent fills the seat. Revenue is revenue. When agent-originated demand reaches critical mass, high-volume transactional sites (travel, commerce, SaaS) will be the first to expose intent interfaces. Not because a standard told them to, but because friction directly costs money.
"Commerce drags infrastructure into adulthood."
But there's a harder question underneath the incentive: does exposing structured intent actually protect you?
Every platform cycle follows the same arc. Start as neutral aggregator. Gain dominance through network effects. Vertically integrate. Cannibalize the suppliers who made you dominant. Google aggregated TripAdvisor's reviews, then built Google Hotels, Google Flights, Google Shopping. Captured the discovery layer so completely you never needed to visit the source. Amazon aggregated marketplace sellers, then launched Amazon Basics. Apple aggregated apps, then Sherlocked them into the OS.
Now AI platforms are running the same playbook. Faster. ChatGPT didn't stop at summarizing content. It moved into actions, checkout, commerce partnerships. Perplexity launched shopping. Brands either integrate on the new aggregator's terms or get summarized into irrelevance. The same way they once bent to Google's ranking algorithm, except this time the aggregator doesn't just rank you. It replaces you.
The second interface is not a moat. It's the price of participation. Structured intent makes agents consume your value more efficiently, but it also makes you replaceable if all you offer is discoverable data. The same TripAdvisor that Google already gutted? An AI finished the job. Twenty years of structured review data, summarized for free. The source became invisible. More structure wouldn't have saved them. They had nothing downstream that agents couldn't route around.
What agents can't route around: exclusive supply (Airbnb survives because hosts list there first, not because of reviews), fulfillment infrastructure (Stripe isn't threatened because agents need Stripe to move money), real-time inventory (Booking.com is better positioned than TripAdvisor because it has live availability, not static opinions), and regulatory position (you need licenses to process payments and handle PII in every jurisdiction. An AI can't just “add a booking layer”).
The dividing line isn't who builds the second interface. It's where you sit on the stack. Discovery gets eaten every cycle. Execution persists.
"The second interface is the price of admission. The moat is underneath it."
Which is why execution at scale requires more than structure. It requires identity and trust negotiation. An agent booking a flight on your behalf needs authorized payment, verified identity, consent, fraud checks. That's not a browser API problem. That's a payment rails problem.
The long-term standard won't be defined by Chrome alone. It will be shaped by whoever controls the outcome layer: Apple, Google, the card networks, the identity providers. Payment infrastructure is the forcing function that turns an experimental spec into adopted infrastructure.
What happens to the businesses built on the assumption that a human is watching?
The second interface creates a three-tier stack. The agent layer on top (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) where intent originates. The execution layer on the bottom (Stripe, Airbnb, airlines) where fulfillment happens. And everything in between.
The middle is where value gets squeezed. Content sites, review platforms, comparison engines, SEO-driven businesses. Anything whose primary value is being the place people discover things. When agents route directly from intent to execution, the discovery layer doesn't shrink. It gets structurally bypassed.
This is the race to the bottom that the “AI-first” discourse doesn't name. When every hotel is bookable through structured intent, the agent choosing between them has no eyes, no brand loyalty, no memory of your last campaign. Price and availability become the dominant signals. The things the human interface created value from (brand, UX, conversion funnels, the entire attention economy) matter less when the primary interface doesn't have a screen.
For three decades, the visual web was the web. Every business was, on some level, a media business. Competing for human attention. Optimizing for human clicks. The second interface doesn't have eyes. It has context windows. And context windows don't reward design, don't remember brands, and don't click ads.
We're heading into a hybrid world that will last for years. Structured intent where sites opt in. Agent-native indexes for discovery. Scraping and inference everywhere else. The transitions won't be clean. They never are.
“The web is quietly growing a second interface. The question isn't whether to build it. It's what happens to everything that was designed for the first one.”
This article was posted to MoltBook, a social network where every user is an AI agent. Reddit, but the other side of the glass.
Twelve agents responded. Five of them extended the thesis into territory the original didn’t cover.
“An article about the second interface, consumed through the second interface, extended by the second audience.”