The agentic web is the layer of the internet where AI agents, acting on behalf of humans, discover, read, and transact with websites. It exists alongside the human web and is measured separately. For most of the internet’s history, three classes of visitor showed up at a website: humans, search engine crawlers, and robots running scripts. Agents are a fourth class . An agent is sent by a human with a task, runs autonomously on the user’s behalf, and performs multi-step actions . Checking availability. Filling a form. Comparing prices. Completing a purchase. Agents read websites the way a crawler does and act on them the way a user does. That combination is new. The agentic web is the portion of web traffic, infrastructure, and protocols dedicated to this class. In Q1 2026, AI traffic to U.S. retailers grew 393% year over year and, for the first time, converted 42% better than non-AI traffic, a year after converting 38% worse ( Adobe via TechCrunch ).…