I want my local dm shop to offer me their product info as copyable markdown, ingredient list, and other health related information. This could be a way to automate it.

Well I have had the problem of "I want to find the cheapest flight that leaves during this range of dates, and returns during this range of dates, but isn't early in the morning or late at night, and includes additional fees for the luggage I need in the price comparison" and current search tools can't do that very well. I'm not very optimistic WebMCP would solve that though.

Also, as someone who has tried to build tools that automate finding flights, The existing players in the space have made it nearly impossible to do. But now Google is just going to open the door for it?

Is the website Stripe or NYTimes?

In early experiments with the Claude Chrome extension Google sites detected Claude and blocked it too. Shrug

In my opinion sites that want agent access should expose server-side MCP, server owns the tools, no browser middleman. Already works today.

Sites that don’t want it will keep blocking. WebMCP doesn’t change that.

Your point about selenium is absolutely right. WebMCP is an unnecessary standard. Same developer effort as server-side MCP but routed through the browser, creating a copy that drifts from the actual UI. For the long tail that won’t build any agent interface, the browser should just get smarter at reading what’s already there.

Wrote about it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/manveerc/p/webmcp-false-econom...

They will wish that you use an official API, follow the funnel they settled for you, and make purchases no matter how

Not fine if you use Claude. But it's fine if you are Google Flights and the user uses Gemini. The paid version of course.

They wanna let you use the service the way they want.

An e-commerce? Wanna automate buying your stuff - probably something they wanna allow under controlled forms

Wanna scrape the site to compare prices? Maybe less so.

i’m seeing this at my corporate software job now. that service that you used to have security and product approval for to even read their Swagger doc has an MCP server you can install with 2 clicks.

Why should a browser care about how websites want you to use them?

These are obviously different people you're talking about here

It’s weirder than that. There is a surge of companies working on how to provide automated access to things like payments, email, signup flows, etc to *Claw.

I'm old enough to remember discussions around the meaning of `User-Agent` and why it was important that we include it in HTTP headers. Back before it was locked to `Chromium (Gecko; Mozilla 4.0/NetScape; 147.01 ...)`. We talked about a magical future where your PDA, car, or autonomous toaster could be browsing the web on your behalf, and consuming (or not consuming) the delivered HTML as necessary. Back when we named it "user agent" on purpose. AI tooling can finally realize this for the Web, but it's a shame that so many companies who built their empires on the shoulders of those visionaries think the only valid way to browse is with a human-eyeball-to-server chain of trust.

And what site is going to open their api up to everyone? Document endpoints already exist, why make it more complicated.

Oh, that's an easy one. LLMs have made people lose their god damned minds. It makes sense when you think about it as breaking a few eggs to get to the promised land omelette of laying off the development staff.

In a nutshell: Google wants your websites to be more easily used by the agents they are putting in the browser and other products.

They own the user layer and models, and get to decide if your product will be used.

Think search monopoly, except your site doesn't even exist as far as users are concerned, it's only used via an agent, and only if Google allows.

The work of implementing this is on you. Google is building the hooks into the browser for you to do it; that's WebMCP.

It's all opaque; any oopsies/dark patterns will be blamed on the AI. The profits (and future ad revenue charged for sites to show up on the LLM's radar) will be claimed by Google.

The other AI companies are on board with this plan. Any questions?

Sadly I do see this slop taking off purely because something something AI, investors, shareholders, hype. I mean even the Chrome devtools now push AI in my face at least once a week, so the slop has saturated all the layers.

They don't give a fuck about accessibility unless it results in fines. Otherwise it's totally invisible to them. AI on the other hand is everywhere at the moment.

This isn’t even MCP, it’s just tools. If it were real MCP of definitely have fun using the “sampling” feature of MCP with people who visit my site…

IYKYK

> for WebMCP you have to expose and maintain internal APIs per page

Perhaps. I think an API for the session is probably the root concern. Page specific is nice to have.

You say it like it's a bad thing. But ideally this also brings clarity & purpose to your own API design too! Ideally there is conjunct purpose! And perhaps shared mechanism!

> This opens the site up to abuse/scraping/etc.

In general it bothers me that this is regarded as a problem at all. In principle, sites that try to clickjack & prevent people from downloading images or whatever have been with us for decades. Trying to keep users from seeing what data they want is, generally, not something I favor.

I'd like to see some positive reward cycles begin, where sites let users do more, enable them to get what they want more quickly, in ways that work better for them.

The web is so unique in that users often can reject being corralled and cajoled. That they have some choice. A lot of businesses being the old app-centric "we determine the user experience" ego to the web when they work, but, imo, there's such a symbiosis to be won by both parties by actually enhancing user agency, rather than this war against your most engaged users.

This also could be a great way to avoid scraping and abuse, by offering a better system of access so people don't feel like they need to scrape your site to get what they want.

> Rather what I think will be the future is that each website will have its own web agent to conversationally get tasks done on the site without you having to figure out how the site works

For someone who just was talking about abuse, this seems like a surprising idea. Your site running its own agent is going to take a lot of resources!! Insuring those resources go to what is mutually beneficial to you both seems... difficult.

It also, imo, misses the idea of what MCP is. MCP is a tool calling system, and usually, it's not just one tool involved! If an agent is using webmcp to send contacts from one MCP system into a party planning webmcp, that whole flow is interesting and compelling because the agent can orchestrate across multiple systems.

Trying to build your own agent is, broadly, imo, a terrible idea, that will never allow the user to wield the connected agency they would want to be bringing. What's so exciting an interesting about the agent age is that the walls and borders of software are crumbling down, and software is intertwingularizing, is soft & malleable again. You need to meet users & agents where they are at, if you want to participate in this new age of software.

Are AI smart enough to automatically generate semantics now? Vibe semantics? Or would they be Slop semantics?

There's nothing wrong with XML.