@tjrobertson52

So everyone's talking about AI agents right now and whether or not they're going to replace websites. Now, I don't think they're going to replace websites anytime soon, but I do think we can finally see a direct path to how AI agents become more important than websites. So I wanna walk through what this looks like and how I think we know this, and I'm going to use a small business as an example.

I actually think we just entered what I'm gonna call phase one of the AI agent rollout. Right now, most of these AI agents are really just glorified chatbots. They can also use a few tools.

And up until recently, these chatbots have been pretty terrible. In fact, in most cases, you are better off just using generic ChatGPT than any of these proprietary chatbots or AI agents. Reason I say we're just entering phase one is because I think we're just getting to the point where a lot of these custom chatbots are actually very useful.

Nowadays, you can actually build a very helpful chatbot that lives on your website, reliably answers questions on behalf of your brand, and can even perform simple actions on your behalf. Now, this has been possible for a while, but only recently have developers and agencies figured out how to do this reliably and at a price that actually makes sense. So, for example, right now I'm doing this for some of my clients with some developers That charge about $5,000 to build a bot like this.

My prediction is that over the next few months, more and more companies are going to start adding these bots to their website. It's a much better user experience than trying to sift through all the different pages of a site to find your answer. Very cost effective for the website owner.

And while we don't have much data yet, I suspect it's gonna be really good for their rankings in Google and these LLs. So that's phase one. What comes next?

I think we'll be in phase 2, when these bots are experts at using tools and at talking to other AI agents. This is being enabled by Google's Agent to agent protocol. Just like Claude's MCP protocol, which allowed tool use.

The agent to agent protocol is being widely adopted. And so we can expect that all agents will be able to talk to all other agents, and that will be game changing. Now, at this point, I think you'll still want your AI.

Agent to live on your website, and there will still be times where people want to browse your website. However, you won't be dependent on your website like you are now, because people will be able to do anything they can do on your website through your agent. I strongly believe this is coming, and I really think every small business owner should have an agent before we reach Phase 2.

But of Course, it's not gonna stop there. So what's phase 3? We'll know we're in Phase 3 when all of these AI.

Agents are fully integrated into the major AI. Models like ChatGPT and Gemini or whatever the AI models are at that time. At this point, it will very rarely make sense to go to someone's website because the AI models will serve as an operating system of sorts.

These models will be connected to every brand or individuals agent the same way that Google Search is currently connected to every website. It'll just be way more convenient to work with one agent. They can easily communicate with all the other brands agents to get the information you want and take whatever actions you want online.

So will we still have websites at that point? Who knows? Probably.

But they won't be nearly as important as having an AI agent. So if you have a website or a business and you haven't started thinking about this, now's the time.