In this guest article, Sean Blanchfield, founder of AI agent platform Jentic, tells us what marketers can do to prepare in the wake of the agentic web.
This week I had a good debate with an old colleague about “enshittification” and the future of media. A decade ago, Dr Johnny Ryan and I were fighting on the same side to save the open web. Back then, I recruited him into PageFair, where we were sounding the alarm about the vicious feedback loop of bad ads, adblockers, worse ads, and more blockers. We shouted loudly enough that people called it the “adblockalypse” of the twenty-teens.
After our partnership Johnny went to Brave (the browser) and then to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, where his work got him dubbed “the thorn in Google’s side” by Protocol and “Google’s biggest headache” by Die Zeit. We compared notes on the next big thing: AI agents. It took us about an hour to reach violent agreement. The middle layer of the internet, feeds and search, has been enshittified. Agents are about to accelerate the rewiring.
Generative AI has created a supply shock: a flood of cheap content that looks fine at a glance but collapses under inspection. Recommendation systems, already tuned to chase engagement, now have a bigger buffet of slop to serve. The result is less trust, and less oxygen for real reporting.
Johnny made a crucial point: feeds are now our gatekeepers, and they decide what most people see. When social media companies fall under political influence, they become instruments of hybrid warfare. Thus, the rise of the right wing in Europe can be in some part traced back to political influence over US-based social media. Malice isn’t required; the gravitational pull of leadership priorities ensures a thousand routine decisions lean the same way. That’s no foundation for a healthy public sphere.
Retail Media Gets Bent Out of Shape
Retail media is unlikely to remain unscathed too. For the last decade, retail media networks were the growth story in advertising. Golden closed-loop measurement inside shopping environments. But if my agent can compare specs, warranties, stock, and prices, then the shelf space that matters is the top three recommendations that it surfaces for me.
Performance marketers who thrived on keywords and last-click will now fight on new terrain. They are no longer pitching impatient humans, but tireless fact-oriented agents. Agents will respond to structured product data, reliable reviews, warranties, and service guarantees. Thin affiliate pages won’t cut it. Machine-readable pros and cons will.
The Audience Flight
When the public square feels noisy and gamed, people drift to places where identity and authenticity are clearer. Newsletters, podcasts, WhatsApp channels, private communities.
Johnny used a camera analogy I like. When phone cameras got good enough, the market split. Free at the low end, high-end gear at the top. Media is polarising the same way. Commodity updates are agent fodder. Scarcity lives in scoops, beat expertise, and taste. And taste is hard to fake.
What Media Should Do to Prepare
Three moves stand out.
- Become agent-ready.
Treat assistants as distribution channels. Expose signed feeds and APIs with rich metadata. Publish living briefs: canonical 200-word answers with bullet takeaways and sources, updated daily. Adopt provenance tech like C2PA for images, audio, and video, and start signing text. Make your work legible to machines, and they’ll select and credit you. - Monetise signals, not just pageviews.
The value in reviews isn’t the article. It’s the rubric and data behind the verdict. License that into agent ecosystems. In news, package timelines, who-is-who graphs, and explainer primers so assistants can cite them. Shift KPIs toward “included in agent answers” and “signed-content ratio.” - Build for private distribution.
Deliver habitually in the channels people actually check: AM/PM briefings, weekend explainers, member Q&As. Give readers a handoff to their assistant (“Ask your agent to pull the last three updates on X”). Tie flows to first-party relationships so attribution and revenue don’t vanish in remix.
The Human Truth
Policy will matter too: defaults, transparency, data-use norms. But media cannot wait for regulators. The center of gravity is already moving.
And under all of this is a simple truth that agents will not replace: being there. Reporting still comes down to the human who knows the sources, earns the trust, and gets the call at midnight. Agents can compress the packaging, not the relationship.
The internet’s middle layer will keep degrading. Agents will speed that collapse by removing steps between intent and outcome. The winning strategy for media is to be legible to machines and indispensable to humans. License your trust into every agent, and cultivate communities in high-signal private spaces. The organisations that thrive will be the ones that effectively wire their judgment into agents while doubling down on the human reporting and taste that agents cannot fake.
