Is this the new technical SEO frontier? This question is top of mind for many of us as Google has recently unveiled an early preview of WebMCP, a protocol shaping the way AI agents engage with websites. According to André Cipriani Bandarra from Google, “WebMCP aims to provide a standard way for exposing structured tools, ensuring AI agents can perform actions on your site with increased speed, reliability, and precision.”
WebMCP offers developers the capability to communicate with LLMs through our websites about the specific actions that various buttons and links should initiate. With this protocol, websites can publish a “Tool Contract” using the new browser API, navigator.modelContext. This means rather than leaving the AI to guess, our websites can present a structured list of functions, like buyTicket(destination, date), allowing the AI to execute these functions directly.
Structured interactions for the agentic web. WebMCP introduces two new APIs enabling browser agents to act on behalf of users:
- Declarative API: This offers standard actions that can be simply defined within HTML forms.
- Imperative API: For more complex, dynamic interactions that need JavaScript execution.
These APIs serve as a crucial bridge, making our websites “agent-ready” and facilitating more reliable and high-performance agent workflows compared to raw DOM actuation.
Use cases that Google has put forward highlight how AI agents can tackle complex tasks efficiently and confidently for users:
- Travel: With structured data, agents can help users search for, filter, and book the exact flights they want, ensuring accuracy in results.
- Customer support: Agents can automatically populate detailed customer support tickets, filling in all required technical details without user intervention.
- Ecommerce: Enhancing shopping experiences where agents can locate, configure, and navigate purchasing options flawlessly.
How to access the preview. If you’re interested in trying out WebMCP, you can apply for the preview through this link.
Why we care. The advent of agentic experiences marks a significant shift in search and potentially SEO. Esteemed voices in the industry, such as Dan Petrovic and Glenn Gabe, have highlighted this as a pivotal transformation, comparable to the impact of structured data and described it as a big deal.
Exploring these cutting-edge protocols could be extremely valuable for anyone keen on staying at the forefront of SEO developments.
Inspired by this post on Search Engine Land.
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