A human looking for software runs a search, skims an answer engine's summary, clicks three links, and lands on a page you spent six figures designing. An agent doing the same job never sees that page. It consults a list of things it can call — a catalog of tools, skills, and connectors, each described by a name, a short description, and an input schema — and it picks one. If your product isn't in that list, described in a way the agent's planner will choose, you are not slow to be discovered. You are absent. The task completes without you, and you never get a log line telling you it happened.
That is the shift, and most founders are still optimizing the wrong surface for it. The discovery layer that mattered for twenty years was the human web: SEO, then paid acquisition, then the answer engines that summarize the web and hand a shortlist to a person. Each of those still ends in a human eyeball on an interface. The layer forming now doesn't. When an agent is the one accomplishing the task — book the freight, reconcile the invoices, enrich the lead, run the refund — the thing it evaluates before acting is not your design. It's a machine-readable declaration of what you can do and how to invoke it.
What the agent actually reads
Strip the mysticism out of "the agent chooses your tool" and here is the mechanism. An agent has a planner (the model) and a set of available capabilities it can invoke. Each capability is presented to the model as structured text: a name, a natural-language description of what it does and when to use it, and a schema for its inputs and outputs. Under the Model Context Protocol, those capabilities are exposed by servers the agent connects to. MCP is the connective standard for surfacing tools, resources, and prompts to a model in a uniform way, so a capability you expose once can be consumed by many different hosts. "Skills" are packaged, discoverable capabilities that ride on top of that plumbing: a bundled competence an agent can find and call. Registries are the emerging directory, the place an agent (or the human configuring it) browses to decide what to connect.
When the model needs to act, it reads those descriptions the way you'd skim a menu and it chooses. Not a fuzzy vibe: a concrete decision conditioned on the text in front of it. Given a task and a list of tools, it asks which of these names and descriptions matches what I'm trying to do, and do I have the arguments the schema demands. A tool called create_shipment with the description "Book a freight shipment between two US addresses; returns tracking number and cost" and a clean schema gets selected for a shipping task. A tool called LogiFlow with the description "The all-in-one logistics platform for modern teams" does not, because the second one is marketing copy aimed at a human buyer and it tells the planner nothing about what function to call or what to pass it.
Sit with that gap. The exact prose that wins on a landing page — aspirational, benefit-led, brand-forward — is the prose that loses in a tool catalog, because the reader is now a planner matching capability to intent, not a person you're trying to make feel something. The craft of writing a description a planner reliably selects is its own discipline, and I've argued the fuller version of it separately: an agent is only as good as its tools, and the tool is only as good as the interface you hand the model. For now the load-bearing point is narrow. The unit of discovery has changed from a page a human reads to a declaration a model parses.
Distribution moves to the registry
Follow the money and the consequence is a relocation of distribution. For the human web, distribution meant ranking, being the result a person clicks. For the agent web, distribution means being in the catalog the agent consults and being the entry its planner picks. Those are different games with different winners.
Consider a mid-market finance team that adopts an agent to close the books each month. Whoever configured that agent connected it to some set of MCP servers: an accounting system, a bank data provider, a reconciliation tool. From that point on, every month, the agent reaches for what it's connected to. It does not run a fresh search. It does not weigh your gorgeous homepage against a competitor's. It calls the reconciliation tool already in its catalog because that tool is there and its description matches the task. Your acquisition problem is no longer "rank for the query." It's "be the connector in that agent's configuration, and be the one the planner selects when two connectors overlap."
This has a brutal implication for how competition works. The interface a competitor has to beat is no longer your landing page. It's your tool description and your schema. If a rival exposes a capability with a crisper description, cleaner inputs, more reliable outputs, and lower latency, the planner will migrate to it silently, mid-workflow, with no rebrand and no ad spend and no human ever comparing the two products side by side. There's no loyalty in a selection loop. The model re-decides every time, on the text and the observed reliability. You can be displaced by a better description field. Most teams have not internalized that the copy determining their agent-channel survival is fifty words of functional prose they'd assign to a junior engineer as an afterthought.
The gatekeeper returns, wearing new clothes
Here is where I want to be honest about the risk rather than sell the upside. A registry that agents consult is a chokepoint, and chokepoints accrue power to whoever curates them. We have seen this movie. The App Store decided which software a billion phones could install, took thirty percent, and set the rules of ranking, review, and removal. A registry of MCP servers and skills is structurally the same kind of object: a directory that intermediates discovery, and therefore a place where a curator can charge rent, impose policy, privilege house capabilities, and delist you.
The dependency is real and it's new. If your agent-channel distribution runs through a registry someone else controls, you've swapped one gatekeeper (the search engine's ranking algorithm) for another (the registry's curation and the host's default connector set). It may be worse, because the switching cost is embedded in someone else's agent configuration rather than in a human's habit, and configurations are stickier than habits. Nobody reconfigures a working automation for fun. Whoever becomes the default catalog inside the dominant agent hosts will have the kind of leverage that funds a decade. That is a prediction, and I'll flag it as one: the shape is early, the standards are still moving, no single registry has won, and I'm not going to invent names or adoption numbers for a surface that is genuinely in flux. But the incentive gradient points hard toward consolidation and gatekeeping, and betting against that gradient has historically been a way to lose money.
So the strategic posture is two-handed. Expose your capability through the open standard so you're portable across hosts and not hostage to one directory. And get into the registries that matter early, while curation is loose and being a well-behaved, reliable connector is cheap, rather than late when the slots are auctioned. Portability is your insurance against the gatekeeper; presence is your distribution. You need both, they're in tension, and that tension is exactly why it deserves a founder's attention and not a delegated ticket.
What this asks you to build
The concrete work is smaller than the strategic stakes suggest, which is the good news. You already have the capability, the thing your product does for a customer. What you likely lack is a clean, callable, well-described exposure of that capability that an agent can find and invoke without a human in the loop.
Practically, that means three things, in order. First, decide which of your capabilities are worth exposing as callable tools: not your whole surface area, but the specific verbs an agent would want, the actions with clear inputs, clear outputs, and real value when performed autonomously. Second, write the descriptions and schemas as a first-class artifact, because that text is now your storefront to every planner that will ever consider you. Third, and this is the part that separates a demo from a business, handle the fact that agents will eventually not just call your tool but pay for it, authenticate to it, and rate-limit against a budget. When software is the customer, the transaction layer underneath these calls becomes its own frontier, which is why the agent-to-agent economy where software negotiates with software is the necessary companion to this piece: discovery gets you selected, settlement is what makes the selection a revenue line instead of a cost center.
None of this requires abandoning your website. Humans are not going anywhere, and a landing page that converts a human buyer is still worth building. The claim is additive and specific: there is a second surface now, growing fast, where your beautiful UI is literally invisible and a fifty-word functional description is the entire competition. Right now almost everyone has built the first surface and none of the second. That asymmetry is the opportunity, and it closes.
The teams that win the next distribution cycle won't be the ones with the best homepage. They'll be the ones an agent can find in a catalog, understand from a description, call with a schema, and pay through a protocol, while their competitors are still A/B testing a hero image no planner will ever load.