Tools: Future of Internet Crawling: WebMCP

The problem with traditional crawling ## Visual understanding: Old Web vs WebMCP ## WebMCP workflow ## WebMCP shifts the web from: ## Real-world impact scenarios ## What this means for the future of crawling For decades, the internet has been crawled the same way humans browse it. Bots download pages, parse HTML, click links, and try to guess what each element does. Search engines do it. Automation tools do it. And now AI agents do it too. But there is a problem. Modern websites are not simple documents anymore. They are dynamic apps, full of JavaScript, state, authentication, and complex user flows. For AI agents, interacting with them today is like navigating a city by looking at satellite images and guessing where the doors are. And it may redefine how the internet is crawled and interacted with in the AI era. Let’s understand how AI agents currently work on websites. Most agents follow a loop: Slow, Expensive in tokens, Fragile when UI changes, Often inaccurate and in many cases, the agent is guessing. One report describes this well: today’s agents often rely on screenshots and raw HTML, which forces them to infer where buttons and forms are, consuming large amounts of context just to understand the page. This is not scalable for an internet where AI agents may become primary users. User request: “Book a flight from Mumbai to Delhi” Page → Screenshot → Vision model → Find form → Type → Submit → Wait → Parse results Each step adds latency and token cost. No UI interaction. No guessing. No screenshots. This structured approach improves efficiency dramatically. Some implementations report up to 89% token savings compared to screenshot-based methods. Document web → Action web E-commerce Agent Prompt: “Buy the cheapest noise-cancelling headphones” The purchase becomes an API call. Instead of crawling full pages, sites provide structured context and resources. This reduces processing by more than 60 percent in some evaluations while maintaining high task success rates. If an AI agent can complete a task directly on a competitor’s site via WebMCP, your UI might never be visited. The internet was built for humans. Then it was optimized for search engines. Now it is being redesigned for AI agents. WebMCP represents a fundamental shift from crawling pages to executing intentions. If this standard succeeds, the future crawler will not scrape your HTML. It will ask your website what it can do. And the websites that answer clearly will become the new gateways of the AI web. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse CODE_BLOCK: tool: searchFlights inputs: origin, destination, date Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode CODE_BLOCK: tool: searchFlights inputs: origin, destination, date CODE_BLOCK: tool: searchFlights inputs: origin, destination, date CODE_BLOCK: searchFlights({ origin: "BOM", destination: "DEL", date: "2026-03-01" }) Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode CODE_BLOCK: searchFlights({ origin: "BOM", destination: "DEL", date: "2026-03-01" }) CODE_BLOCK: searchFlights({ origin: "BOM", destination: "DEL", date: "2026-03-01" }) - Load the page - Take a screenshot or parse the DOM - Send it to a model - Decide what to click - Crawlers indexed content - Automation simulated humans - Websites expose capabilities - Agents perform tasks directly - Think of it like the difference between: - Reading a restaurant menu (HTML) - Calling orderFood() (WebMCP) - Navigating pages - Sorting filters - Clicking add to cart - searchProducts() - addToCart() - Less scraping, more structured access - Ranking may change - Invisible websites risk