The Web Is Being Rebuilt for AI Agents. Can Yours Be Found?

For twenty years, getting found online has meant one thing: ranking on a page that a person would read, scan, and click. A quieter shift that landed this month suggests the next audience for your business may not be a person at all. It may be a piece of software sent to do the looking for them.

On 17 June 2026, Google's developer blog set out a draft open standard called Agentic Resource Discovery, backed by Google, Microsoft and several other large technology companies. In plain terms, it is a shared agreement for how AI agents will find and use tools, services and other agents across the open web. It is dry, technical, and easy to scroll past. It is also the early plumbing for a web where an assistant, not a customer, does the searching.

That sounds abstract until you picture the everyday version. Someone tells their assistant to find a plumber who can come Tuesday, compare three quotes, and book the best one. For the assistant to do that, it has to discover which businesses can actually do the job, understand what each one offers, and decide. The standards being agreed now are what make that moment possible at scale.

What is actually being built

An AI agent is software that carries out a task from start to finish rather than just answering a question: it finds, compares, books, follows up. Until recently, an agent had to be wired by hand to each service it used. The shift underway is to let a business publish a clear, machine-readable description of what it does, which agent directories can index, so an agent can discover it at the exact moment it is needed. It builds directly on the open standard Anthropic introduced on 25 November 2024, the Model Context Protocol, which gave agents a common way to connect to tools and data. Agent discovery extends that same idea outward, to the whole web.

None of this is finished, and standards take time to settle. But the direction is unmistakable, and the companies driving it are the ones that already sit between you and your customers. When Google, Microsoft and their peers start agreeing on how agents find businesses, it is worth understanding what that means for yours before it becomes the default.

Why this matters for a small business

For years, being found meant a human typing a query, scanning a page of blue links, and choosing. Increasingly there is a layer in between: an assistant that reads, filters and decides, then surfaces a shortlist or simply acts. If that assistant cannot understand what you do, where you operate, what you charge, and whether you are available, you are invisible to it, no matter how polished your website looks to a person.

Practical-AI voices like Andrej Karpathy have pointed out how fast agents are moving from impressive demos to doing real, multi-step work. The same trend that already changed search, where AI answers increasingly stand between you and the click, is now reaching the point where the customer hands the whole task to a machine. We have written before about how AI assistants are starting to shop on a customer's behalf; agent discovery is the layer that decides whether your business is even in the running when they do.

Where the opportunity is

The point is not to panic, and certainly not to chase every new acronym. It is to understand that the definition of getting found is widening, and to make sure your business is built for both audiences at once. Here is what good looks like when you are ready to be found by people and by the agents acting for them:

• Your business is described clearly and consistently everywhere it appears, so an agent reaches the same accurate answer about you that a careful person would.
• What you do, where you work, and why you are the right choice are stated in plain, structured terms a machine can actually use, not buried in a brochure only a human can decode.
• You show up in the AI answers and emerging agent directories that customers' assistants check first, not only on a results page fewer people scroll.
• When an agent builds a shortlist for someone, yours is on it, and the reason it picks you is one you shaped rather than one it guessed.
• Your visibility to people and to agents is managed as one system, so you are not winning on search while quietly vanishing from the tools that increasingly sit in front of it.

The last decade was about being found by a person who reads. The next is about being legible to an agent that acts, and the businesses that get both right will quietly take the work.NextAura

The honest first move is to know how your business actually looks to these systems today, because most owners have never checked and the answer is rarely what they expect. That sits alongside the work of being visible in AI search, which is the same discipline aimed at today's assistants rather than tomorrow's agents.

This is exactly the work we do at NextAura. We make sure an Australian small business is found and chosen across search and AI, by the people looking and by the assistants increasingly looking for them, and we keep watch as the standards shift so you are ready before the change reaches your customers rather than after. If you would rather have someone steering this while you run the business, get in touch and we will take it from there. The standards here are still draft and moving, so treat the specifics as a direction of travel, not a finished rulebook.