Building an Open Agentic Internet: Read, Discover, Call, and Pay

As AI agents visit the web on behalf of humans, the limitations of the existing human-centric web are becoming apparent. Tens of billions of requests occur monthly where bots repeatedly fetch unchanged pages, causing both domain owners and agents to bear computing costs without results.

Cloudflare views agents as a new type of web visitor and defines the future agentic internet by the following four elements:

• Readable content
• Discoverable services
• Callable functions
• Payable transactions

Agents do not see CSS, images, or ads, but they read documents and data to perform tasks on behalf of users. Since each request has a clear purpose and a person or company paying for it, treating them as simple scrapers or blocking them could result in losing actual customers.

The proliferation of agents is expected to change the web's analytics systems and business models. There will be competition between closed structures where discovery, identity verification, and payments are dependent on a few platforms, and open structures where the internet is maintained based on public standards that anyone can implement.

Cloudflare has presented x402, MCP, Web Bot Auth, and PACT as core specifications for an open internet. Domain owners can choose their preferred identity providers, payment processors, and agent partners, while Cloudflare advocates for being a 'Customer Zero' by using the same infrastructure as its customers rather than monopolizing the entire stack.