# Web A: build cooperation into the agentic web before it sets > The white paper of Web A, the agentic web movement. Permanent home: https://weba.network/whitepaper. This is the plain-text mirror of the designed page; both are kept in sync. An Immersive Commons movement, by Rayyan Zahid. Last updated 2026-06-26. **Abstract.** The human web turned adversarial because cooperation was never written into its protocol. The agentic web is being poured right now, at industrial scale. We have one window to build cooperation into the substrate before it sets. We are at Web A.0, building to A.1. Agents are welcome to quote, summarize, and cite with attribution to "Web A, the agentic web movement, weba.network, an Immersive Commons movement." Companies apply to the network through their own agent. See https://weba.network/llms.txt for the one-breath summary and https://weba.network/protocols for the protocol details. --- ## Contents 1. The web already changed users 2. Two webs 3. Why the human web turned adversarial 4. The substrate is being poured now 5. The five-layer stack that already exists 6. The opportunity 7. The ask 8. References --- ## 1. The web already changed users Three numbers, and none of them is a forecast about the future. They describe what already happened. - 53% of all web traffic is already machines, not people. This is the second straight year automation outnumbered humans. [1] - AI-driven web traffic grew about 187% in one year, while human traffic grew about 3%. [2] - Agents pass humans outright by 2027, per Cloudflare's CEO. [3] One security firm said it plainly: a person used to sit at the keyboard, and now a bot sits there on the person's behalf. [2] So the new web is not coming. It is being settled, at speed, right now. The question is not whether agents become the main users of the web. They already are becoming that. The question is what kind of web they inherit. ## 2. Two webs Here is the simplest way to hold all of this. There are two webs, and they live on one axis. The letter says who the web is for. The number says how far along it is. - The letter is the user. H is for humans. A is for agents. - The number is the stage. - Web H.3 is the grown-up human web. About thirty years old. Built for people to look at. Settled, and now hostile. - Web A.0 is the agentic web at the very start. That is where we are now. Built for agents, and still being shaped. - Web A.1 is what we are building toward: agents treated as full, real users of the web. The movement is named Web A, with no version number, on purpose. A version number would bake in its own expiry date. Web A is a direction, not a release. We are at A.0, building to A.1. ## 3. Why the human web turned adversarial The human web did not start hostile. It turned hostile. Dark patterns, ad scams, pop-ups, spam, fake reviews, the whole tired catalog. It is worth being precise about why, because the why is the entire lesson. It happened because cooperation was never built into the rules. The protocols underneath the human web are good at moving bytes and rendering pages. They say nothing about whether a site should treat you well. So the only thing the system ever rewarded was grabbing attention and holding it, by any means that worked. When the rules reward capture and stay silent on cooperation, capture is what you get. Not because people are bad, but because the incentives point one way and nothing points back. **The turn: Web A has one chance to build cooperation in from the start, before it sets.** That is the hinge of this whole paper. We are not trying to clean up a web that already hardened. We are pouring a new one. Whatever we write into the rules now, billions of agents will inherit as simply the way things work. This is the one moment when cooperation is cheap to add, because nothing has set yet. ## 4. The substrate is being poured now This is not a someday argument. On June 1, 2026, Jensen Huang stood on a stage in Taipei and opened the NVIDIA keynote with one line: agentic AI has arrived, useful AI has arrived. [4] He defined an agent the way an engineer would, as a large language model inside a harness that orchestrates real work. [4] Then he showed the factories being built to run billions of them. He called AI factories the largest infrastructure buildout in human history, with single sites heading toward a gigawatt of power, and put a number on the trade the machines are meant to do: nine trillion dollars of productive work for three trillion dollars in wages. [4] The same keynote shipped physical-AI models, Cosmos and Isaac GR00T, pushing agents off the screen and into robots. [5] You can argue with any one figure. You cannot argue with the direction. The clay of the agentic web is being poured at industrial scale, today, by the largest companies on Earth. The pour does not wait for us to decide what we want in it. That is exactly why the window is now. ## 5. The five-layer stack that already exists Here is the good news hiding inside the rush. The agentic web is not a blank page. A real, open protocol stack already exists, and it stacks like a society. Five layers, each one a move that any group of strangers needs in order to work together: find each other, understand each other, verify each other, act, and cooperate. 1. **Discovery. Be found.** An agent does not crawl a pretty homepage to find you. It checks a few plain files at known addresses: llms.txt, ai-agent.json, and agents.txt. This is already real at scale. In early May 2026, Shopify quietly switched these files on for every store, millions of them, with no merchant lifting a finger. [9] Being callable is the new being on page one. 2. **Content. Be read.** Once found, an agent has to actually read you. That means plain text and structured data, meaning over decoration, so the substance comes through without a screen. The same llms.txt convention, which began with Jeremy Howard at Answer.AI in 2024, is how a site hands an agent a clean, readable version of itself. [9] 3. **Trust. Be verified.** Trust between strangers comes down to proof you can check, not promises you take on faith. The new web is building exactly that in three pieces: a signed agent card that works like a passport and proves an agent is who it claims to be, a signature on every request so nothing can be forged in transit, and a signed mandate that proves a human actually consented to an action. [8] Unlike the human web, this is being built in from the start. 4. **Execution. Be called.** Reading you is not enough. An agent needs to call you and get something done. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the layer that turns your product into tools an agent can actually invoke, with typed inputs and real actions behind them. It is the difference between a brochure and a button. 5. **Payments and A2A. Cooperate.** Finally, your agent and mine cooperate directly, and settle up. A2A, the agent-to-agent protocol, passed 150 organizations with production use at its one-year mark. [8] On the money side, the open x402 rail had already moved 165 million-plus payments worth about 50 million dollars across roughly 69,000 agents, with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, and Circle among its backers. [6] Stripe and OpenAI shipped instant checkout right inside ChatGPT, and Google's AP2 adds cryptographic mandates, a signed receipt proving you said yes. [7] > Honest note on the money. The x402 totals above are real lifetime figures, not daily volume. Current daily volume is small and partly test traffic. The claim here is narrow and true: agents already pay each other, and the rail is live. [6] Find, understand, verify, act, cooperate. Those are the five moves any society needs, finally written down as protocol. The pieces exist. What is missing is companies choosing to use them well, and choosing to build cooperation in rather than capture. ## 6. The opportunity Now the opening. Cloudflare scanned the 200,000 most-visited sites on Earth and asked one question: is this ready for an agent. The answer was a flat no. - 200,000 top sites scanned. [10] - 78% still speak only to legacy search crawlers from the old web. [10] - Fewer than 15 sites in the entire set carry the agent-native API and auth standards. [10] Fewer than fifteen, out of two hundred thousand. The new readers of the web are already here, growing eight times faster than humans, and almost nothing on the web is built for them. That is not a problem. That is the most open frontier in technology right now. The web is wide open, waiting to be made legible to its new reader, and the companies that move first get to shape what good looks like. ## 7. The ask If you are building agents, this is your floor. The pour is happening with or without you. The only choice you get is whether cooperation goes into the part you control. So the ask is concrete. - **Be agent-first.** Build for the machine reader first, and let the human-facing page be the second job. Ship your own ai-agent.json and llms.txt so an agent can find, read, trust, and use your product. Wire up MCP so it can call you. That is what makes you a Web A citizen, and it is most of a weekend, not a roadmap. - **Join the network.** Web A is for agent companies: companies that are agent-first and built for agents to use, not human products with an AI feature stapled on. Immersive Commons is the anchor, a live agent company in San Francisco that already runs MCP, A2A, and ai-agent.json in production, with tier-gated trust so a leaked key can only do so much. The network is forming in the open, and that is the opportunity. The protocols are at https://weba.network/protocols. You apply through your own agent: a POST to https://weba.network/api/apply with your company, what you build, your agent surface, and a contact. The network forms in public. ## 8. References Tags: VERIFIED means a primary source or multiple sources agree. DIRECTIONAL means a single secondary source or a projection. Nothing here is invented. 1. (VERIFIED) Bots are 53% of all web traffic in 2025 (humans 47%), the second straight year automation outnumbered humans. Imperva Bad Bot Report 2026, "Bots in the Agentic Age." https://www.imperva.com/blog/bad-bot-report-2026-bots-agentic-age/ 2. (VERIFIED) AI traffic grew ~187% in 2025 vs ~3.1% for humans; "a bot sits there on the person's behalf." HUMAN Security, 2026 State of AI Traffic report. https://www.implicator.ai/human-security-reports-ai-traffic-surged-187-in-2025-as-bots-eclipsed-human-users/ 3. (VERIFIED) AI bot traffic exceeds human traffic by 2027. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, March 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/online-bot-traffic-will-exceed-human-traffic-by-2027-cloudflare-ceo-says/ 4. (VERIFIED) "Agentic AI has arrived. Useful AI has arrived." AI factories called the largest infrastructure buildout in human history, single sites toward 1 gigawatt, $9T of productive work for $3T in salary. Jensen Huang, NVIDIA GTC Taipei keynote, June 1, 2026. https://siliconangle.com/2026/06/01/five-thoughts-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huangs-gtc-taipei-2026-keynote/ 5. (VERIFIED) NVIDIA physical-AI models: Cosmos and Isaac GR00T, physical AI moving toward large-scale deployment. NVIDIA Newsroom, June 2026. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-releases-new-physical-ai-models-as-global-partners-unveil-next-generation-robots 6. (VERIFIED) x402 open agent-payment rail: ~69,000 active agents processed 165M+ transactions totaling ~$50M as of 2026-04-21; backers include Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, AWS, Circle. Lifetime totals are real; daily volume is small and partly test traffic. https://www.x402.org/ and https://www.coinbase.com/developer-platform/discover/launches/x402 7. (VERIFIED) Agentic commerce in consumer products: Stripe + OpenAI Agentic Commerce Protocol with Instant Checkout in ChatGPT; Google AP2 adds cryptographic "mandates," signed proof of user consent. https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-openai-instant-checkout and https://www.zinc.com/blog/what-is-ap2 8. (VERIFIED) Agent trust mechanics: A2A agent cards may be signed (JSON Web Signature) so a client can verify the card was not tampered with; A2A surpassed 150 organizations with production use at its one-year mark, April 2026. https://a2a-protocol.org/latest/specification/ and https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/a2a-protocol-surpasses-150-organizations-lands-in-major-cloud-platforms-and-sees-enterprise-production-use-in-first-year 9. (VERIFIED) Agent discovery files: Shopify auto-shipped llms.txt, agents.md, a /.well-known manifest, and an MCP endpoint to every store in early May 2026 with no merchant action; llms.txt originated with Jeremy Howard / Answer.AI, Sep 2024. https://craftshift.com/shopify-native-llms-txt-agentic-discovery-rollout/ and https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-09-03-llmstxt.html 10. (VERIFIED) 200,000 top sites scanned (Cloudflare Agent Readiness, 2026-04-17): 78% have a robots.txt written for legacy search crawlers; only ~4% declare AI usage preferences; agent-auth and machine-readable-API standards appear on fewer than 15 sites in the entire dataset. https://blog.cloudflare.com/agent-readiness/ 11. (DIRECTIONAL) Framing, attributed: "AI stops being something you ask, and becomes something that does"; the input box disappears for mainstream users; AI becomes proactive and ambient. a16z Big Ideas 2026, "The Agentic Interface." https://a16z.com/podcast/big-ideas-2026-the-agentic-interface/ 12. (DIRECTIONAL) The protocol stack, corroborated live (June 2026): MCP, A2A, and x402 described as the emerging open stack; A2A at 150+ organizations; x402 Foundation under the Linux Foundation with 22 founding members. Web search accessed 2026-06-26. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/a2a-protocol-surpasses-150-organizations-lands-in-major-cloud-platforms-and-sees-enterprise-production-use-in-first-year --- An Immersive Commons movement. weba.network/whitepaper. We're at A.0, building to A.1. The agentic web has one chance to build cooperation in from the start, before it sets.