Make Something Agents Want

Y Combinator’s motto, “Make thing group want,” was ne'er astir the product. It was astir distribution. Build the point that finds product-market fit, and the group come. For 20 years, that distribution ran done hunt engines, societal algorithms, paid ads, and connection of mouth. All human-mediated channels.

That changed. In the past six months, Cloudflare, Shopify, Stripe, Supabase, Netlify, and Google each invested successful becoming agent-ready, building for a caller distribution channel: AI agents that sojourn websites, extract information, comparison options, and complete transactions connected behalf of the humans who sent them. Nobody coordinated this. Six companies successful different industries saw the aforesaid point and built for it independently.

When six companies successful different industries build for the aforesaid visitant people independently, the transmission is real.

Your website still needs to make thing group want. But agents are now really galore of those group find it. A website that useful for humans and fails for agents is simply a merchandise pinch a surgery distribution channel.

6 Companies In 6 Industries Made The Same Agent Infrastructure Bet

Cloudflare dedicated an full motorboat week to agents successful April 2026. Not a azygous characteristic announcement. A week. Agent personality done Web Bot Auth pinch GoDaddy. Agent-readable content done Markdown for Agents. Agent-callable functions done WebMCP successful Browser Run. Agent measurement done the Agent Readiness Score astatine isitagentready.com. An infrastructure vendor doesn’t clear their almanac for thing speculative.

Shopify shipped the Agent Toolkit truthful immoderate AI supplier tin browse a store’s catalog, cheque inventory, and complete checkout done a system API. The merchant doesn’t build thing new. Google went further pinch Universal Commerce Protocol, expanded it astatine I/O 2026 pinch Universal Cart, past added Agent Payments Protocol to FIDO Alliance pinch 60 organizations. The commerce furniture for agents went from draught spec to accumulation integration successful nether 3 months.

Stripe shipped Projects, a level wherever AI agents tin create accounts, bargain domains, deploy infrastructure, and negociate subscriptions done Stripe’s costs rails. The infrastructure-buying furniture became agent-transactable overnight.

Netlify built netlify.ai, a dedicated aboveground wherever AI agents tin deploy websites, negociate projects, and entree the afloat level done supplier skills. Not a characteristic wrong the existing product. A abstracted introduction constituent designed for non-human visitors. I talked to their CEO astir this past week, and the reasoning was straightforward: If agents are going to deploy websites connected your platform, springiness them a beforehand doorway built for them.

And past there’s Supabase. Their tagline is “Postgres improvement platform.” That intends almost thing to the vibe coders who made Supabase the default database for AI-built apps. But it’s a cleanable machine-readable explanation of what Supabase is and what a coding supplier tin do pinch it. The tagline sounds for illustration it was written for an agent, not a human. Whether Supabase designed the tagline for agents doesn’t matter. The machine-readable personality worked.

Slide from my Experimentation Elite Space Academy talk: Optimizing successful the AI Era, May 2026 (Image Credit: Slobodan Manic)

None of these companies were responding to each other. They were each responding to the aforesaid thing: a visitant people that needs machine-readable identity, system content, discoverable actions, and predictable transaction flows. A visitant people that is increasing because the humans down the agents for illustration it.

What Investing In Agent-Readiness Actually Means

Agent-readiness is not a fund statement aliases a caller squad to hire. Agent-readiness is simply a group of infrastructure decisions astir really your website delivers what it offers to non-human visitors.

Can agents publication your content? If your website depends connected JavaScript rendering to show its halfway information, astir agents spot an quiet page. Server-rendered HTML pinch semantic building is the floor. Server-rendered HTML is the easiest spread to adjacent and the 1 pinch the astir contiguous impact.

Can agents observe what you offer? A robots.txt that acknowledges AI personification agents, a sitemap that stays current, structured information that names your entities and relationships. These are classical web fundamentals applied to a different visitant class. Nothing present is new. The visitant is.

Can agents act? If your website sells something, tin an supplier complete the purchase? If your website provides a service, tin an supplier invoke it? The protocol furniture (UCP, MCP, WebMCP) is wherever this lives. Most websites are not present yet. That is fine. But the companies that are present are building the moat.

The moat is taking it earnestly earlier your competitors do. Shopify is already enabling Agent Toolkit entree by default for each merchants. The ones paying attraction to what that intends for their merchandise information and checkout travel are the ones capturing the agent-referred traffic. The first SaaS products pinch WebMCP devices get the agent-discovered users. Supabase is the default database for agent-built apps because its personality was machine-readable earlier anyone was reasoning astir it. The model is unfastened because astir websites person not started.

‘Make Something People Want’ Now Includes Agents

The YC motto hasn’t changed. But agents are now portion of really group find what you made, comparison it to the alternatives, and determine whether to bargain it. A website that only useful for humans is simply a merchandise pinch a distribution problem; it doesn’t cognize it has yet.

More Resources:

• From SEO And CRO To Agentic AI Optimization (AAIO): Why Your Website Needs To Speak To Machines
• The Technical SEO Audit Needs A New Layer
• Google-Agent: The Web’s New Visitor Just Got An Identity

This station was primitively published connected No Hacks.

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock