Everyone is talking about OpenClaw. But the biggest thing the little clawed agent highlights is how quickly a totally new type of internet user is going to disrupt the way companies do business online.

AI Assistants have had a fitful start over the last few years. Computer-using agents from the big players struggled to complete tasks and were painfully slow. To date, they've yet to be a viable alternative to using a computer yourself.

OpenClaw highlights where the near future is going. Increasingly autonomous AIs doing tasks on behalf of people for longer and longer periods of time. Unguided and with less and less hand-holding from the people they're doing the bidding for.

Being invisible or poorly optimised for this new type of website user is going to be costly. Even at a conservative estimate of 5% of traffic coming from AI Agents this year, a digital business turning over £1 million a year would stand to lose £65,000 from a site poorly optimised for AI Agents.

This has significant implications for how digital businesses operate. AI Agents interact with the digital world in a vastly different way from humans. Media and advertising space sold on websites could soon become obsolete as AI Agents either ignore distractions keeping them from completing their primary task, or interact with websites programmatically -- bypassing entirely the digital advertising that kept humans clicking and website owners in business.

But it's not just the advertising landscape that AI Agents will reshape. The entire conversion funnel that billions of pounds and millions of hours of UX research, design and development has been poured into will soon be less relevant as agentic users crawl websites on their user's behalf. AI Agents don't 'see' a brand's online presence the same way we do. They're less interested in the animations and visual styling that have defined differentiated players in the market. They want functional experiences that present CTAs clearly, information in a highly machine-readable way, and clear instructions defining how to interact.

So what can you do to prepare?

As a CTO, at a minimum you need to make sure your robots.txt files are permissive enough to allow this new agentic traffic onto your platform. Building an llms.txt file is also important -- it helps agents understand the key elements of your site and navigate it effectively. If you're an ecommerce business, you also need to look into the new agentic commerce protocols being rolled out by Shopify, Stripe, Google and Visa. It's worth carving out time to develop your strategy around these protocols so your business isn't left invisible as agentic traffic rises over the next year.

For product teams, you need to start thinking about AI Agents as a new -- potentially your fastest growing -- customer segment. They interact differently with your site. Solid error messaging to help agents course-correct when they go wrong, clear information at every level of the site, and a constant eye on your discoverability across AI platforms are key. The best way to approach this is to benchmark how your website is handled by AI Agents relative to competitors. Where do agents fail on your site? Where do they fail on competitors?

For CEOs and business leaders, you need to be making space in your product roadmaps for Agentic Conversion Rate Optimisation. This new user group might still seem far away. But as the overnight proliferation of Openclaw shows, this space is moving incredibly quickly. Soon AI Agents will be transacting regularly on your websites and conducting research on behalf of your users.

To help, I've developed a comprehensive 7-day AI Agent Readiness Audit. It covers the technical barriers that prevent agents from accessing your site, the content and discoverability issues that stop agents from finding you, and UX/UI issues that stop agents from completing transactions with you.

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