For twenty-odd years, websites have been built for two readers: people, and search engines. A third one has turned up. AI agents (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and the assistants built into browsers) are starting to do things on websites for people, not just read them: compare suppliers, fill in a form, book a table, ask for a quote.
Right now they do it the hard way. They look at the page, guess which box is which, and hope. A new draft web standard called WebMCP is designed to stop the guessing. Here’s what it is in plain English, whether your business needs to do anything about it yet, and what we’ve switched on here.
What WebMCP is
WebMCP lets a website hand an AI agent a short list of things it can do, each one clearly labelled. Instead of the agent working out that the third box on your contact page is probably “email”, the site tells it: here’s a tool called “send an enquiry”, it needs a name, an email and a message, and this is what each one means.
There are two ways to do it:
- Label the forms you already have. A few extra attributes on an existing contact or booking form describe what the form does and what each field is for. Nothing changes for human visitors.
- Offer tools written for agents. A site can add small, purpose-built tools, such as “search our products” or “check availability”, that an agent calls directly and gets a clean answer back.
The tools only exist while the page is open in the visitor’s own browser. An agent can’t use them from somewhere else, and it acts on behalf of the person sitting in front of it.
Where it’s up to
Be clear-eyed about this part:
- It’s a draft, written in a W3C community group with editors from Google and Microsoft. It isn’t an official web standard yet.
- Chrome and Edge are trialling it. Firefox hasn’t built it, and Apple’s Safari team has said it opposes the current design.
- Very few AI assistants use it so far. You don’t need it to appear in AI answers, and it doesn’t change where you rank on Google.
So this isn’t a drop-everything moment. It’s a sign of where things are heading: the website that’s easiest for an agent to use will be the one the agent picks.
Why it matters for a local business
When someone asks an assistant to “find me a web designer in Dundee and send them my brief”, or “book a table for four on Friday”, the assistant has to get from your page to a finished task. Every bit of guesswork is a chance for it to give up and pick someone else.
We already know AI tools read business websites far more often than they send visitors. Our own server logs showed it, and we wrote it up in Is ChatGPT reading your website?. The next step is agents that don’t just read your site but use it. The businesses whose forms, bookings and product searches work cleanly for them will get the job.
What we’ve done on purpleimp.com
We’d rather show than tell, so this site now speaks WebMCP:
- Our contact form is labelled for agents. An assistant can fill in a brief or a question for you, with every field described. It can’t send it: the form waits for you to check it and press send yourself.
- The free guide sign-up is labelled too, and it still asks you to confirm by email before anything arrives.
- Three read-only tools let an agent look up our services, find case studies (try “football club” or “ecommerce”) and get our contact details, straight from what’s already published on the site.
None of it changes anything for people visiting normally, and in browsers that don’t support WebMCP it simply does nothing.
What you should do now
For most businesses, the useful work is the same work that helps search engines and AI answers today. It just matters more:
- Make your forms honest. Every field labelled properly, no mystery boxes, and error messages that say what went wrong. If a person struggles with your form, an agent will too.
- Put your key facts on the page in words. Prices or price ranges, opening hours, areas you cover, how to book. Not hidden in an image or a PDF.
- Keep anything with consequences in human hands. Payments, bookings and orders should always ask the person to confirm. WebMCP is designed that way, and any site that adds it should keep it that way.
- If you take bookings or sell online, start testing. That’s where agents will arrive first, and where being easy to use will win real business.
If you’d like to know how ready your site is for AI agents, or you want it set up properly, tell us what you’ve got. It sits alongside the rest of our platforms and AI work.
Sources: WebMCP explainer (W3C Web Machine Learning Community Group) · WebMCP draft specification
Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.
Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.
