Machine-First Architecture: AI Agents Are Here And Your Website Isn't Ready, Says No Hacks Podcast Host
Slobodan Manic says AI is no longer waiting for us to come to it. It's coming to us. And websites are nowhere near ready.
AI agents are already here. Not as a concept, not as a demo, but shipping inside browsers used by billions of people. Every major tech company has launched either a browser with AI built in or an extension that acts on your behalf.
Anthropic’s Claude for Chrome can navigate websites, fill forms, and perform multi-step operations on your behalf. Google announced Gemini in Chrome with agentic browsing capabilities including auto browse, which can act on web pages for you. OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent, connects LLMs directly to browsers, messaging apps, and system tools to execute tasks autonomously.
For more understanding about optimizing for agents, I spoke to Slobodan Manic who recently wrote a five-part series on optimizing websites for AI agents. His perspective sits at the intersection of technical web performance and where AI agent interaction is actually heading.
From Slobodan Manic’s testing, almost every website is structurally broken for this shift.
“It started with us going to AI and asking questions. And now AI is coming to us and meeting us where we are. From my testing, I noticed that websites are nowhere near being ready for this shift because structurally almost every website is broken.”
The Single Biggest Thing That’s Changed
I started by asking Slobodan what’s changed in the last six to nine months that means SEOs need to pay attention to AI agents right now.
“Every major tech company has launched either a browser that has AI in it that can do things for you or some kind of extension that gets into Chrome. Claude has a plugin for Chrome that can do things for you, not just analyze web pages, summarize web pages, but actually perform operations.”
When ChatGPT first launched in 2023 making AI widely accessible, in parallel with how we started typing basic queries in search engines 25 years ago, we asked AI questions. We are now becoming more sophisticated and fluid with our prompting as we realise that AI can do so much more than [write me an email to politely decline an invitation].
Agents represent an even bigger shift to a different dynamic, where AI can complete tasks on our behalf and run complex systems. [Check my emails and delete any that are spam, sort them into a priority group and surface what needs my immediate attention and provide a qualified response to anything on a basic query, plus make appointments in my calendar for any meeting invites].
Understanding and taking advantage of the possibilities is something we are all trying to figure out right now. What we should be aware of, is that most websites aren’t built or ready for this agentic world.
Websites Are Becoming Optional, Or Are They?
I have a theory that brand websites are becoming hubs, the central point that connects all of your content assets online. But Slobodan has gone further. He’s written about websites becoming optional for the end user, with pages built by machines for machines and the interaction happening through closed system interfaces. I asked him to expand on that vision and what kind of timeframe we’re realistically looking at.
“First I’ll say that this is not fully happening today. This is still near to mid future. This is not March 2026,” he clarified. But the signals are concrete.
“Google had a patent granted in January that will let them use AI to rewrite the landing page for you if your landing page is not good enough. And then we have all these other companies including Google that announced Gemini browsing for you inside Chrome. So we have an end-to-end AI system that does everything while humans just wait for results.”
He was careful not to overstate it. People still like to browse, read, and compare things. Websites aren’t disappearing.
“Just the same way as mobile traffic has not killed desktop traffic even if it’s taken a bigger share of traffic overall, higher percentage of overall traffic while the desktop traffic is staying flat in terms of absolute numbers, I think this is another lane that will open where things will be happening without a human being involved in every step.”
His timeline for this: “Within a year we can have this become a reality. Not majority, but if Google starts rewriting landing pages using AI, we will see this happening probably 2027, if not sooner.”
When Checkout Becomes A Protocol
Slobodan has written that checkout is becoming a protocol, not a page. If an AI agent can buy on your behalf without ever loading a brand’s website, I asked what does that mean for how brands build trust and differentiate when the customer never sees their site?
“If you’re building trust in a checkout page, you’re doing it wrong. Let’s start there. That I firmly believe. This is not to do with AI. This was never the right place to build trust.” He responded.
He pointed to every Shopify checkout page that looks identical. “There’s no trust built there. It’s just a machine-readable page that looks the same for everyone, for every brand. You’re supposed to be doing your job before the user needs to pay you.”
This is where he referenced Jono Alderson, and the concept of upstream engineering. “Moving upstream and doing work there and not on the website is the only way to move forward for anyone whose job is optimizing websites. That’s SEO, that’s CRO, that’s content, that’s anyone doing any kind of website work.”
He best summarised by saying “Your website is a part of the equation. Your website is not the equation. And that’s the biggest structural shift that people need to make to survive moving forward.”
What SEOs And Brands Should Actually Do Now
I asked what SEOs and brands can practically start doing to transition over the next year. His answer reframed how we should think about the website itself.
“If your website was your storefront, and it was for decades, people come to you, people do business there. It needs to be a warehouse and a storefront moving forward or you’re not going to survive. Simple as that.”
“We had all those bookstores that were selling books in the 90s and then Amazon shows up and then you need to be a warehouse. You need to exist in two planes at the same time for the near future at least. So focusing only on your website is the most wrong thing you can do moving forward.”
His main area of focus right now is what he calls machine-first architecture. The principle is to build for machines before you build for humans.
“You don’t build your website for humans until you’ve built it for machines. When you’re working on a product page, there’s no Figma, there’s no design, there’s no copy. You start with your schema. What is your schema supposed to say? What is the meaning of the page? You start with the meaning and then from that build into a web page as it’s built for humans.”
He compared it directly to the mobile-first shift. “That did not mean no desktop. That meant do the more difficult version of it first and then do the easy thing. Trust me, it’s a lot more complicated to add meaning and structure to a page that’s already been designed than to do it the other way.”
And it extends beyond the website. “If you’re saying something on your website, you better check all of your profiles everywhere online, what people are saying about you. It’s everything everywhere all at once. But this is what optimization has become and what it needs to be.”
I also put to him the argument that optimizing for LLMs is fundamentally different from SEO. His response was unequivocal.
“Hard disagree. The hardest possible disagree. If you were doing things the right way, working on the foundations and checking every box that has to be checked, it’s not different at all.”
Where he sees a difference is in the speed of consequences. “With AI in the mix, you just get exposed much faster and the consequences are much greater. There’s nothing different other than those two things.”
This echoed something I’ve felt strongly. The cycle is moving more quickly, but there’s so much similarity with what happened at the foundation of this industry 25 to 30 years ago, which I raised in my SEO Pioneers series. We’re feeling our way through in the same way. And Slobodan agreed.
“They figured this out once and maybe we should ask them how to figure it out again.”
Vibe Coding Is A Trap, Deep Work Is The Moat
For my last question, I put it to Slobodan that he’s said vibe coding is a trap and deep work is the only moat left. For the SEO practitioner feeling overwhelmed, what’s the one thing they should actually do this week?
“It’s really the foundations. I hate to give the boring answer, but it’s really fixing every single foundational thing that you have on your website or your website presence.”
He’s watched the industry chase one shiny tool after another. “There’s always a new shiny toy to work on while your website doesn’t work with JavaScript disabled. Just ignore all of that until you’ve fixed every single broken foundation you have on your website.”
On vibe coding specifically, he was precise: “I don’t like the term vibe coding. It just suggests that you have no idea what you’re doing and you’re happy about it. That’s the way that sounds to me. The concept of AI-assisted coding, it’s there. It’s great. It’s not going away.”
“But just focus on what you should be doing first before you use AI to do it faster.”
What resonated with me is how well this applies to writing too. AI is brilliant at confidently producing a draft that at first glance looks great. But when you actually read it, you realize it’s just somebody confidently talking nonsense.
Slobodan nailed the core problem: “You need to know what good is and what good looks like. Because AI will always give you something. If you don’t know enough about that specific thing, it will always look good from the outside. And there’s a reason why everyone is okay with vibing everything except for their own profession, because they try it and they see that the results are just horrific.”
Build For Machines First, Everything Else Follows.
The one thing to take away from this conversation is to build for machines first, then humans. Not because human user experience won’t matter, but because getting the machine layer right first makes the human layer better.
Your website is no longer the only version of your business that people, or agents, will encounter. The brands that treat it as part of a wider ecosystem rather than the whole ecosystem are the ones that will come through this transition in the strongest position.
Watch the full video interview with Slobodan Manic here, or on YouTube.
Thank you to Slobodan for sharing his insights and being my guest on IMHO.
Thank you for having me on the show Shelley!