The Web Is Forking: How AI Agents Are Creating a Parallel Internet

Introduction

For thirty years, the web has been built for human eyes. HTML pages with visual layouts, CSS styling, JavaScript interactivity — all designed for people sitting in front of screens, clicking links, scrolling pages, and processing visual information. That web still exists. But a second web is now emerging alongside it, and the companies building it are not startups experimenting with an idea. They are the infrastructure companies that power the modern internet.

In a single week in February 2026, three things happened within hours of each other. Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets — crypto wallets designed not for people but for AI agents. Cloudflare shipped Markdown for Agents, a feature that automatically converts any website into agent-readable markdown when an AI system requests it. And OpenAI published developer tools — skills and shell commands — that let agents install software dependencies, run scripts, and write files inside hosted containers.

None of these companies coordinated their announcements. They did not need to. They are all building toward the same future — a parallel web designed not for human consumption but for machine consumption. And collectively, their infrastructure creates something larger than any of them individually intended: the foundation for an autonomous agent economy.

The Fork Explained

The web is forking into two distinct layers that will coexist but serve fundamentally different audiences.

The human web is what we have today: visually designed pages optimized for engagement, comprehension, and emotional response. Navigation menus, hero images, color palettes, typography, animations, call-to-action buttons. Every element is crafted for the experience of a person processing information through a screen.

The agent web is emerging as a parallel layer: structured data, clean hierarchies, machine-parseable facts, and API endpoints. No visual design. No emotional hooks. No persuasion architecture. Just data in formats that AI agents can read, process, and act on.

This is not a theoretical distinction. Cloudflare, which serves roughly 20% of all web traffic globally, has built the fork directly into its infrastructure. When a browser requests a page, Cloudflare serves the normal HTML/CSS/JS version optimized for human eyes. When an AI agent requests the same page, Cloudflare can now automatically serve a markdown version — stripped of visual formatting, organized for machine extraction, structured for reliability.

The implication is architectural. Every website on Cloudflare’s network now potentially has two versions of itself: one for humans, one for agents. The content is the same; the presentation is fundamentally different. And as the percentage of web traffic originating from agents grows — which it is, measurably, month over month — this dual-layer architecture becomes not just useful but necessary.

The Building Blocks of the Agent Web

The agent web is not a single technology. It is a convergence of infrastructure being built simultaneously by the companies that control the critical layers of the internet.

Cloudflare: The Content Layer. Cloudflare’s markdown-for-agents feature addresses the most basic challenge of the agent web: making human-designed content machine-readable. Today, when an AI agent needs to extract information from a website, it must parse HTML designed for visual rendering — stripping away navigation, ads, sidebars, and formatting to find the actual content. This is unreliable and wasteful. Cloudflare’s solution — automatically serving structured markdown to agents — makes the entire content web accessible to AI systems at scale. Given Cloudflare’s market position, this is not an experiment. It is a new default for a significant fraction of the internet.

Stripe: The Payment Layer. Stripe, which processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments annually, is building payment infrastructure that lets agents authorize and complete transactions. Not through a human clicking a “buy” button in a checkout flow, but through API calls that an agent can make autonomously. Stripe’s agent payment APIs represent a qualitative shift: when agents can pay, they can participate in commerce independently. The agent does not need to return to a human at the checkout step. The entire transaction, from discovery through comparison through purchase, can be completed programmatically.

Coinbase: The Wallet Layer. Coinbase’s Agentic Wallets allow AI agents to hold funds, send payments, and interact with decentralized finance protocols. This is distinct from Stripe’s approach — Stripe handles traditional payment rails, while Coinbase enables agents to operate in the crypto and DeFi ecosystem. An agent with a wallet has financial autonomy. It can pay for services, receive payments, and manage funds without routing every transaction through a human-controlled account.

OpenAI: The Execution Layer. OpenAI’s shell tools and skills for agents represent the most significant capability in this stack. When an agent can install software, run scripts, write files, and interact with APIs programmatically, it is not just consuming the web — it is operating on it. An agent with execution capabilities can build software prototypes, run data analysis pipelines, manage deployment workflows, and interact with enterprise systems. This is the capability that transforms agents from sophisticated browsers into autonomous workers.

The Convergence

Here is what most commentary on these individual announcements misses: these are not separate developments. They are a convergent infrastructure play.

When you combine Cloudflare’s content layer (the web becomes agent-readable) with Stripe’s payment layer (agents can transact) with Coinbase’s wallet layer (agents can hold and manage funds) with OpenAI’s execution layer (agents can run code and interact with systems), you get something that none of these companies is building individually but all of them are building toward collectively: an autonomous agent economy.

A layer of the internet where AI agents can discover information, evaluate options, make decisions, execute actions, and complete payments — all without human involvement. The primitives exist today. The integration is happening now. The agents are already using these capabilities in limited contexts. What is coming in the next 12 to 18 months is the scaling of these capabilities from early experiments to mainstream workflows.

This is not a hypothetical. An agent given the task “find the cheapest flight to Tokyo that connects through a city where I have friends” can already, in principle, query flight APIs, check a contacts database, cross-reference layover times with a calendar, and book the optimal route. No single travel service offers this composite product. The agent creates it by composing multiple services on the fly.

This is emergent functionality — new capabilities that arise when existing services expose structured data and APIs, and agents are intelligent enough to stitch them together. No one needs to build an integration between service A and service B. The agent reads both, understands both, and chains them together in real time. The emergent web is not a platform anyone will build. It is what happens automatically when the primitives exist and the agents are capable enough to combine them.

The Content Layer Is Splitting

For content creators, publishers, and website operators, the fork creates a new strategic challenge. Today, most websites serve the same content to both humans and agents, which is suboptimal for both.

What humans want from content: visual design, narrative structure, emotional engagement, storytelling, persuasion, entertainment. A product page needs compelling imagery, benefit-driven copy, social proof, and an intuitive purchase flow.

What agents want from content: structured data, clean hierarchies, machine-parseable facts, consistent formatting, reliable metadata. A product page needs accurate specifications, real-time pricing, availability status, return policies, and fulfillment timelines — all in structured, extractable formats.

The businesses that figure this out first will serve two versions of their content: a human version optimized for engagement and a machine version optimized for extraction. This is already happening in search — Google’s AI Overviews extract structured answers from web pages and present them directly to users. The websites that rank best for AI extraction are not always the same ones that rank best for human engagement.

For knowledge workers and content creators, the implications are strategic. You are no longer writing only for humans. You are writing for the agents that will summarize, extract, and recommend your content to humans. The skills required shift from pure persuasion to structured clarity. Content that thrives in an agent-mediated web is content that agents can reliably parse, accurately summarize, and confidently recommend.

This means structured data matters more than ever. Schema markup, clean HTML semantics, consistent metadata, machine-readable product specifications — these become competitive advantages, not just SEO checkboxes. The websites with the cleanest structured data will be the ones agents recommend. The websites with the most compelling visual design but poor structured data will be invisible to the agent web entirely.

Implications for Every SaaS Product

The execution layer has perhaps the most sweeping implications. Every SaaS product that currently requires a human to click through a user interface will eventually need an API that agents can use. Every workflow that currently requires human coordination between tools becomes automatable. Every business process that exists because humans need intermediation between systems is a candidate for agent replacement.

This does not mean that all human intermediation disappears. It means that the intermediation that involves reading, processing, and producing structured information is the intermediation most likely to be automated. The intermediation that involves judgment, creativity, relationship building, and ambiguity navigation remains human.

The professional services sector — tax preparation, legal document drafting, financial analysis, market research — involves humans reading information, processing it, and producing outputs. Agents that can read the web, run code, and interact with services can automate significant portions of these workflows. Not all of them. But enough to restructure how these services are delivered and priced.

The Timeline Is Compressed

When Cloudflare, Stripe, Coinbase, and OpenAI are all building agent infrastructure simultaneously, the timeline compresses dramatically. These are not venture-funded experiments. These are the infrastructure companies that the modern internet runs on.

Cloudflare serves 20% of web traffic. Stripe processes hundreds of billions in payments. OpenAI powers the most widely used AI systems in the world. When these companies ship agent infrastructure, it is not an experiment. It is the new baseline.

And the new baseline means that every business, every content creator, every knowledge worker needs to start thinking about the agent web now. Not because it will replace the human web — it will not, at least not in any near-term horizon. But because it will exist alongside it. And the businesses and individuals who understand both webs will have a fundamental advantage over those who understand only one.

The web is forking. The human web and the agent web are diverging. And the infrastructure for the agent web is being built right now by the most important companies on the internet. The question is not whether this will happen. The infrastructure is already shipping. The question is who will be ready for it.

Sources & Further Reading

• Cloudflare — Markdown for AI Agents (Developer Documentation)
• Stripe — Agent Payment APIs (Developer Blog)
• Coinbase — Agentic Wallets Launch Announcement
• OpenAI — Agent Tools: Skills and Shell (Developer Blog)
• W3C — Structured Data and Schema.org
• Cloudflare Radar — Web Traffic Trends 2026