Every day, more of your traffic isn’t human. AI agents show up, grab what they need, and leave — and you pay to serve every visitor, whether they see your brand or not.
Today’s guest has seen this from both sides. Brandon Harris is VP of Product at Pantheon, the WebOps platform behind a huge slice of the WordPress and Drupal world. But before that, he was sending the bots — at Wiser, where his team scraped millions of pages a day to power retail pricing intelligence.
His take: agents aren’t killing the web. They’re just the new way information is traveling. And the companies that adapt are about to pull way ahead of the ones that don’t.
In this episode, Brandon shares:
How AI is turning the whole web into one giant CMS and quietly rewriting the job of anyone who publishes content
Why site visits are the new impressions, and what happens to hosting economics when the meter can’t differentiate a customer from an agent
Why trying to keep agents out is the modern-day version of blocking Google from indexing your site, and what to do instead
1. Agents aren't killing the web. They're just the next mode of transportation.
The “dead internet” theory assumes that this new wave of internet traffic is essentially eating itself; AI made to consume AI and AI made to be consumed by AI. Brandon has a different opinion, and he relates it to the history of transportation:
“We were walking, and then we found wheels, and carts, and animals, and then bicycles. We could do some self-powered things, and then trains, then cars. But each time that happens, there’s this sense that the new technology for transportation is gonna overtake all of the previous technology, and we’ll never use it. But the reality is, I still have to teach my kids how to ride a bike.”
If you replace the thing being transported from people to information, then agents are a genuinely new transportation method. As a result, browsing traffic is changing. But it’s not being eliminated.
“We’re gonna see a compression in the volume of human traffic, and we’re gonna see a compression in the volume of traffic that is intended just for browsing, but it’s never gonna go away. And in some ways, it makes it more valuable.”
Product takeaway: Falling human traffic isn’t an automatic sign of failure. The mix is changing underneath the number. As a result, you should segment your analytics by traffic type before you react to the topline. Because the humans who still show up are arriving with more intent than they used to, and that should change what you build for them.
2. Why site visits are the new impressions
Here’s the uncomfortable math: a bot and a buyer cost your CDN, host, and CMS the same amount to serve.
Brandon, who spent a stint as interim CMO at a previous company, sees the same correction coming that advertising already went through: going from counting eyeballs to paying for action.
"The visit will become kind of like impressions. They're valuable, but not the same value as a conversion. And we'll start to get better at tracking both."
The interesting part is that this isn’t a case for locking the gates, so to speak. Brandon’s point is that the industry posture is shifting from keep everything out to something more selective — closer to traffic grading, where a site decides what a given interaction is actually worth and both sides negotiate from there. Some large publishers are already building toward charging for access.
He relates it to sites in the past blocking Google from indexing them:
“Five years ago, everything was: how do we block bots, how do we stop them from coming? And it’ll shift to, well, we want some, but not all [agents].”
Product takeaway: If your economics are priced per visit but your value is created per conversion, you have a modeling problem that’s going to get worse every quarter. Start instrumenting traffic by value now — which agents drive real conversions and which are pure cost — so that when better grading and pricing tools arrive (Brandon guesses roughly a year, and probably from startups rather than infrastructure incumbents), you already know what you’d pay for.
3. Is the whole web becoming one giant CMS?
Traditionally, a CMS holds structured information and assembles it into a page on request. Now, that’s a pretty fair description of what an agent does to the entire internet.
Brandon watched an early version of this at Gannett fifteen years ago, where a project assembled news sites on demand from whatever content was available across hundreds of properties. The difference now is that the source pool is everyone’s site, not just yours:
“If the web is the CMS, if all this data is available very quickly in real time, I can assemble it into whatever I need it to be to either build a new product or a new page on demand.”
He’s clear that this produces slop, too, not just value — the same split we get across all platforms. Which is why the job of publishing content changes. It’s no longer enough to just have accurate information sitting on your domain. Your content now has to survive extraction and still be recognized as yours.
“How do you provide brand placement within the content that you create, so that when it is pulled, it is still representative of your brand or harkens back to your brand?”
Brandon frames this as inserting your brand’s “fingerprints” into your content the way broadcast used product placement. The industry’s done this before: Google forced an entire generation of teams to learn how to structure content for a crawler. This is the same thing, just maybe one level up in complexity.
Product takeaway: Audit your content for what survives being pulled out of context. Does a paragraph lifted into an answer still carry your point of view, data, name, etc.?
4. Look for the drift before it wrecks the tool
Unhappy users rarely file a ticket saying they’ve lost confidence in you or your product suite. They just start to drift, slowly, in a way that never shows up as an event.
Brandon’s framing for what to do about it comes in two parts:
First, know what you’re protecting:
“Understand your superpower and your kryptonite. Your superpower, amplify it — get your super suit, get the utility belt. For your kryptonite, protect against it, because it’s not just things that you’re weak at, it could be things that drain you and drain your value.”
Second, go hunting for change on purpose, because it won’t announce itself. He borrows the term from machining:
“If you’re not looking for the drift, you won’t see it until it’s messed up your tool.”
This means watching real user sessions, tracing where people fall out of the funnel and why, and treating behavioral shifts as information rather than noise. This loops straight back to agents: the mix of searchers and browsers on your site is changing right now. If AI handles the initial lookup, then maybe your search bar matters less, and your browsing experience matters more. You won’t know unless you go and check.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:24 Brandon's product journey: From film school to Wiser and Pantheon
03:46 The dead web debate: Agents are just the next mode of transport
07:13 Why traffic-based pricing can break when the majority of your visitors are agents
09:37 Site visits are becoming the new impressions
12:08 Grading traffic and the identity arms race it will start
15:33 When the whole web becomes your CMS
18:02 Putting your brand's fingerprints in content that AI will pull without accessing your site
22:45 How people decide to trust a site
27:39 Watching sessions to catch user drift before customers quietly leave
32:31 Conclusion
Links
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