[ArielTM]

The browser analogy holds because publishers wanted browsers. Sites lived with User-Agent and robots.txt because the click paid for it.

AI agents are the destination. No return click to bargain with. That's why Cloudflare just went default-block + 402 Payment Required instead of waiting on a standards body.

Open standards on the agent side are the easy half. Getting sites to show up is the part W3C can't fix alone.