What is Agentic Web?

The Agentic Web is the next-generation web paradigm in which AI agents, entrusted with a user's intent, navigate, orchestrate, and transact across the web in place of a human doing the browsing.
An arXiv paper (2507.21206) frames the evolution as PC web to mobile web to agentic web, organizing the paradigm around three axes: Intelligence, Interaction, and Economics.
The technical foundation rests on open protocols such as MCP, which connects agents to tools and data; A2A, which lets agents collaborate with one another; and Microsoft's NLWeb, which makes websites readable by agents.
As visitors shift from people to agents, the goal of content exposure moves from driving clicks to being included in an agent's recommendations and citations, which ties directly into GEO.
The Agentic Web sits one level above an individual tool like an AI agent or a search behavior like agentic search, focusing instead on the wholesale restructuring of the web ecosystem itself.

What the Agentic Web Is

The Agentic Web is the next-generation web paradigm in which, rather than people opening pages and clicking links through a browser, AI agents take on a user's delegated intent to navigate the web, orchestrate multiple services, and complete tasks autonomously. The July 2025 paper Agentic Web: Weaving the Next Web with AI Agents (arXiv:2507.21206, Yang et al.) defines it as a new phase of the internet characterized by autonomous, goal-directed interaction, explaining that the center of gravity shifts from human-driven interaction to machine-to-machine interaction between agents.

The crux is delegation. When a user simply expresses an intent such as "plan a three-day, two-night trip to Jeju this weekend and book the lodging," a personal agent communicates with various agents and services that supply flights, accommodations, weather, reviews, and more, handling the planning, coordination, and execution on the user's behalf. People are freed from repetitive digital chores, but the essence of the paradigm shift is that the web's "consumer" changes from a person to an agent.

The Web's Third Stage of Evolution

The paper positions the Agentic Web as the third stage in the web's evolution. Where the PC web and the mobile web each reorganized human interaction around desktop and mobile devices respectively, the Agentic Web is the stage where AI agents become the actors driving interaction. The paper lays out a framework of three axes for understanding and building this paradigm.

Axis	Meaning
Intelligence	The capability foundation by which agents plan, reason, and execute
Interaction	The protocols and orchestration that enable communication and coordination among agents
Economics	The economic structure that sustains a viable agent ecosystem

The paper further anticipates that the established dynamic, in which agents competed for a user's attention, may be reshaped into an Agent Attention Economy, where agents compete for invocation and selection by other agents.

Components and Protocols

For the Agentic Web to function, agents must communicate with tools, data, and other agents in a standardized way. Three open protocols currently underpin the ecosystem.

Protocol	Led By	Role
MCP (Model Context Protocol)	Anthropic	Connects agents to external tools and data; discovers and invokes tools over JSON-RPC (agent to system)
A2A (Agent-to-Agent)	Google, donated to the Linux Foundation	Enables agents from different vendors and frameworks to collaborate and delegate tasks (agent to agent)
NLWeb	Microsoft	Lets websites offer a natural-language, semantic interface so that people and agents can read them together

MCP is often likened to an "API layer" and A2A to the "orchestration mesh" sitting above it. If MCP defines the conversation between an agent and a system, A2A defines how agents talk to one another regardless of which company built them or which framework they run on. A2A was developed by Google and donated to the Linux Foundation, and it is designed so that agents can collaborate without exposing their internal memory or proprietary logic.

NLWeb: The HTML of the Agentic Web

On May 19, 2025, at Build 2025, Microsoft unveiled its vision for an "open agentic web" along with NLWeb. Microsoft describes NLWeb as playing "a role similar to HTML in the agentic web." In other words, it lets a website offer a conversational, semantic interface built from its own data, so that both people and AI agents can engage with the content richly.

A key design point is that "every NLWeb endpoint is also an MCP server," allowing a website to selectively open its content for discovery and access by agents. NLWeb builds a natural-language interface by combining the semi-structured data that websites already publish, such as Schema.org and RSS, with LLM tooling. It was conceived by R.V. Guha, the creator of RSS, RDF, and Schema.org, who joined Microsoft as a CVP and Technical Fellow.

Evidence and Examples

The Agentic Web has clear substance, with academic conceptualization and big-tech infrastructure announcements advancing in parallel.

Academia: Beyond arXiv:2507.21206 (2025), follow-on research continues, such as 'Internet 3.0: Architecture for a Web-of-Agents' (arXiv:2509.04979, 2025), which addresses a Web-of-Agents architecture and agent-ranking algorithms.
Microsoft: At Build 2025, it brought first-party support for MCP to GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure AI Foundry, and Windows 11; added A2A support in the Azure AI Foundry Agent Service; and announced NLWeb as a new open project.
Early NLWeb adopters: According to Microsoft's announcement, companies including TripAdvisor, Shopify, O'Reilly Media, Eventbrite, and Common Sense Media are piloting NLWeb to bring agent experiences to their own sites.
Google: By developing the A2A protocol and donating it to the Linux Foundation, Google advanced a vendor-neutral standard for agent collaboration.

SEO and GEO Implications

When visitors change from people to agents, the very goal of content exposure changes. Where traditional SEO aimed to draw people to your site, the Agentic Web makes getting agents to cite, recommend, and select you the central objective. This is the direct backdrop for the rise of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

Structured data as table stakes: Agents read data rather than seeing design the way people do. Product schemas and JSON-LD, Schema.org markup, and APIs or feeds that surface up-to-date inventory and pricing become de facto entry requirements. The fact that NLWeb is built on Schema.org and RSS reinforces this.
Agent readability first: Semantic structure and clear information design matter so that pages can be mechanically discovered and parsed by agents. As with the NLWeb-endpoint-equals-MCP-server pattern, designing content to be exposed in an agent-accessible form becomes a competitive edge.
Agentic commerce: Flows are emerging in which an agent reads a product page, selects options, and completes checkout entirely through APIs. Industry analysis (ForkPoint/agenticstorefront) suggests that conversion rates for agent-mediated traffic may run higher than for ordinary search, though this remains an estimate still being validated.
Measurement and monitoring: Beyond click- and impression-centric metrics, new KPIs are needed to track how often agents invoke, cite, and recommend you.

Distinguishing Adjacent Concepts

The Agentic Web is often conflated with AI agents or agentic search, but its focus differs. An AI agent is an individual software actor that carries out tasks, and agentic search is closer to the behavior or function of an agent finding information. The Agentic Web, by contrast, refers to the paradigm in which such agents are connected through standard protocols and the entire web ecosystem is reshaped. In short, it goes beyond a single tool or an individual search behavior to emphasize the macro-level shift in how the web as infrastructure operates, moving from human-centric to agent-centric.