Gatekeepers of Agent Traffic
Andrew Chang@achang
−4.6%
since Oct 8
The idea
I believe the web is splitting into agents that shop for people and agents that sell for businesses, and these agents already generate more traffic than humans do. So I own the companies sitting in between: the networks that see and sort agent traffic, the platforms business agents run on, identity checks, payment rails, and the tools that monitor what agents actually do.
What it owns
- These companies sit in front of websites and see, sort and charge for agent traffic, positioning them closest to becoming a shared record of how agents move across the web. · Cloudflare, Inc.It sits in front of a huge share of the web and already sees which agents show up, what they ask for and whether sites let them in, putting it closest to building a record of agent traffic., Akamai Technologies, Inc.It is the older, established gatekeeper that carries and filters traffic for many big companies, so it sees agent visits at scale and can sort good agents from bad ones., Fastly, Inc.It is a smaller network positioned to see and filter agent traffic for sites that use it, betting that a second-tier gatekeeper still gets paid to manage bots and agents at the edge., F5, Inc.It guards the apps and APIs that big companies run, which is exactly where business agents get hit by outside agents trying to buy, ask or negotiate and need to be sorted.27%
- Business agents need stores, protocols and software to run on, and these companies own the largest platforms where agents operate and where merchants compete through them. · Shopify Inc.It runs the stores for millions of merchants, so it is the natural place for a merchant's business agent to live and for personal agents to shop and compete on price and service., Alphabet Inc.It already organized the web once with search and is pushing standards for how agents shop and pay, making it a likely common layer where personal and business agents meet., Microsoft CorporationIt puts agents in front of hundreds of millions of workers and shoppers through Copilot and Windows, and sells the cloud where business agents run and learn to act and buy., Salesforce, Inc.It's positioned as a platform where companies build their customer-facing agents, making it central to how business agents interact with customer data and service workflows.27%
- When agents buy things, the money still moves over these networks, and each has built tools for agents to pay safely without exposing the original payment method. · Mastercard IncorporatedIt is building ways for agents to pay with a stand-in card number tied to a person's permission, so the real card never gets handed over to an agent acting on their behalf., Visa Inc.When a personal agent closes a deal with a business agent, someone has to move the money and stand behind the transaction, which its network is the default for today., PayPal Holdings, Inc.It has hundreds of millions of saved wallets and logins that an agent could use to check out for someone without asking for card details, becoming a common checkout button for agents., American Express CompanyIt runs its own network and backs purchases with protection and dispute handling, which matters more when an agent, not a person, made the buy on someone's behalf.17%
- No deal between two agents closes until each side trusts who the other one is acting for, and these companies provide the identity and permission tools agents depend on. · Okta, Inc.When agents act for people and companies, someone has to confirm who an agent is and what it is allowed to do, which is its core job across sign-in and permission tools., Palo Alto Networks, Inc.It secures the machine identities and network traffic that agents create inside companies, which becomes a security problem big companies need to pay to handle and solve.11%
- Businesses competing on reliability and results need to measure how agents behave on their systems, and these companies provide the tracking and data storage agents require. · Datadog, Inc.It tracks what software is doing and flags when it breaks, and agents acting on their own need that kind of watching and measurement of their actions and results even more., MongoDB, Inc.It is a database many developers use to store the messy, changing data agents need to remember past conversations and attempts without relying on tools bundled free by big clouds.9%
- Cash9%