When
the
Music
Traffic
Stops
Are you ready?
Toby Daniels
Co-Founder, ON_Discourse
Editor’s Note: Toby has been hosting a lot of events lately about the future of web interaction. This piece is the first of a 2 part series that is exploring a new economic and experiential model of the web. The first part focuses on a time when traffic no longer matters.
Most of the internet was built on the assumption that visitors come to you.
They’d scroll, browse, compare, click. They’d notice your design. Maybe even read your copy. Maybe they sign up, purchase, submit, perhaps even share it with others.
This assumption drove an economic model that paid designers, developers, strategists, social media managers, project managers, ad sellers, ad buyers, and a thousand other roles, to build the internet we know and use today. The currency flowing that entire system is traffic.
What happens when traffic stops?
We’re entering a phase where the first point of contact isn’t a person, it’s a proxy. AI agents don’t browse. They don’t care about UX. They ask, “Can I complete this task?” If the answer is no, they move on, fast.
The implication isn’t just technical. It’s existential. When the music stops and you don’t have a chair, you are out of the game. When the traffic stops and you are not referenced, you might as well not exist.
If you’re building something, marketing something, trying to show up, how do you do that in a world where showing up means being callable, not visible?
We’ve been engaging our members on this topic, including notable AI builders and been asking some uncomfortable but urgent questions:
- What if your “user” is now an agent acting on someone’s behalf?
- What happens to branding, storytelling, and interface when no one sees them?
- And what if the only way to compete is to make yourself legible, not to people, but to protocols?
If we play this out, there’s no homepage to optimize for. No funnel to tweak. No guarantee your product will even be seen. What matters now is whether you’ve made yourself useful, readable, identifiable, to a machine that makes a determination before a person even shows up.
This is what we’re sitting with at ON_Discourse. Not a future of more interfaces, but fewer, and maybe none at all, just agents moving on our behalf, quietly deciding what matters.
If you’re building something right now,are you thinking about this? How are you going to get noticed by the machine?
Stay tuned for part 2...
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