Yes, YOU Can Have Your Very Own Sears Catalog Moment

Your website doesn’t matter any more. Your API does.

You should read this if you’re trying to figure out what is happening to web traffic right now.

You should read this if you’re a CTO wondering if your beautifully optimized UI is becoming irrelevant.

You should read this if you’re an online retailer.

Really you should especially read this if you are B2C anything that involves charging consumers for goods or services.

TLDR

AI agents don’t visit websites. They hit APIs. If your data isn’t parseable, you don’t exist. They’re not going to build integrations to your special snowflake data model, and your hero image user experience meow meow meow is obsolete. You have maybe six months to get ready or disappear entirely. Hi, welcome to Existential Dinner Theater™. Would you like a booth, or the garotte?

The web was just a 30-year workaround for not being able to talk to computers. Now we can talk to computers.

The workaround is over.

You’re a Frog, and the Water Gonna Boil

Terminal traffic decline is a thing. It’s already happening. This isn’t some hand-wavy prediction about AGI taking over in 2030. No skynet. More prosaic. Google’s AI Overviews launched in May 2024, and by May 2025 zero-click searches jumped from 56% to 69%. Publishers are reporting traffic declines between 10% and 89% depending on content type.

The Planet D shut down after losing 90% of traffic. Chegg saw a 49% decline. One Pew study found users are half as likely to click any link when they see an AI Overview.

This is not theoretical. This is the catalog moment, happening right now.

Remember when Sears kept printing those gorgeous catalogs while Amazon was building search infrastructure? JCPenney kept optimizing glossy layouts while customers migrated to browsers. The catalogs didn’t disappear immediately. No, they just stopped mattering.

Websites are entering that same twilight.

Mark my words.

Against the Grain (Again)

I’ve spent decades (ugh that hurts to say) building systems that had to work despite or against conventional wisdom. At TypeZero (and then Dexcom), I built FDA-regulated algorithms that made life-critical decisions, a notoriously long and convoluted path to product launch. And despite being at the giant corporate “powerhouse”, I operated like a scrappy startup CTO, and we cut development cycles from 8-10 years to about 8 weeks. At Hotelicopter/Room Key, we handled 60,000% growth in 7 months using Clojure when everyone said we were insane for not using Java.

Both times, the pattern was the same: identify where the real business value lives and ruthlessly optimize for that.

At TypeZero, the value wasn’t in the algorithm itself. It was in the tools, people and processes that designed, optimized and validated the algorithm. Heck the algorithm was a byproduct! The “old way” took a decade and like 30 studies and $20 million dollars of NIH money. The value was in figuring out “How do we compress all of that into a few weeks?” Before that, at Room Key, the value wasn’t in pretty hotel photos. It was in having systems that scaled, not just in computes, but in accommodating inflexible partners.

Now we’re at another inflection point. And once again, everyone’s looking at the wrong layer, because that’s how things have worked “so far”.

The Great Decoupling

Here’s what’s actually happening: AI agents are executing purchases without users ever visiting homepages. ChatGPT needs to check inventory across retailers. Claude needs to compare prices. Perplexity needs to verify availability.

They don’t care about your hero image. They don’t care about your carefully crafted user journey. They need your data, your inventory, your pricing. They need it in a format they can consume programmatically.

Let me say that awful, terrible, inconvenient truth again: Your website sucks. It always has. EVERY website sucks. I want to shop the way I do everything in my “regular” life: with natural language. The very fact that we have the term “user experience” IS the problem. Your site = friction. Period. Full fucking stop.

Yes this does mean you. YOU, the company still optimizing conversion funnels are like those JCPenney catalog designers arguing about font kerning in 1999. You’re solving the wrong problem.

Don’t be sad. You’re not alone.

(Aside: YES, they are going to “own” your customer. Read that again. Weep a little. Then just accept it.)

Three Uncomfortable Truths

Truth #1: Your website is becoming a vestigial organ

Like an appendix, it’ll hang around for a while. Some people will still use it. But the real action (actual transactions) will happen through agent-mediated channels. Your beautiful React app with its 97 Lighthouse score? Irrelevant. (Whomp womp)

Truth #2: The backend is the new frontend

Remember when everyone said “mobile first”? The new mandate is “agent first.” That means APIs, data standardization, real-time inventory, dynamic pricing. The unsexy stuff that actually makes commerce possible. Your API (and the swampy, cruddy, inflexible, usually broken integrations behind it) is what matters.

Truth #3: Integration complexity is the new moat

When an AI agent needs to check product availability across hundreds of retailers, it’s not going to build those integrations from scratch. The companies that own those pipes (the boring, painful, enterprise integration pipes) will own the infrastructure layer of agent-mediated commerce. And they will charge you for it. (Because… yes, capitalism.)

Here’s what I mean (specifically): The harder a thing is to pull off (at all), the harder it is to replicate. It’s really, really painful to hook up an API front end to a disparate set of systems in the backend that include: “How many bottles of paint thinner model #231 in the 6 oz size with the blue cap do we have on hand?”, “What is our point-in-time fulfillment rate at warehouse X, where that inventory item is located?”, “What do we know about this customer, do they have an account, what’s their purchase history?” “What’s our estimated margin on this sale, for this customer, if we charge X?” “What’s left in my placement budget for this month?” “What sales are we running that match this item?” Those questions probably implicate at least a half-dozen to a dozen disparate systems, many of which are legacy.

One Weird Trick!

Over a decade ago now (god it still hurts to say these age things, ugh) at Room Key, I built for this future, without knowing it at the time. We put all our inventory data into Solr instances baked directly into our API layer. Heretical at the time (data and code living together!) but it gave us horizontal scalability and eliminated version mismatches.

We rendered JSON, not HTML. We built APIs first, UI second. We optimized for machine-readable data, not human eyeballs.

We thought we were optimizing for scale. Turns out we were optimizing for the post-website world.

To be really intellectually honest, I hadn’t the slightest idea that the pattern of API-first would end up being as important as it is about to be.

The Playbook

If you’re still reading, here’s what you do:

1. Audit your real assets Not your funnel metrics, dwell time, net promoter, or UI components. Your data structures, your inventory systems, your pricing engines. How accessible are they programmatically? How standardized? How real-time? How often do they fall over, and why?

2. Build protocol, not product Stop thinking about user journeys. Start thinking about data contracts. What would an agent need to transact on your platform? Build that.

3. Own the pipes Every integration you build, every API connection you establish, every data pipeline you standardize… that’s your moat. If you leave API integration to a 3rd party, then you are leaving your whole business to a 3rd party. The companies that recognized this early (Stripe for payments, Twilio for communications, Shopify for e-commerce) own their verticals.

4. Embrace being boring The sexy stuff like AR shopping experiences, personalized UIs, gamification… none of it matters if an agent can’t figure out your inventory structure. Be boring infrastructure that everything else relies on cuz it just works, all the time.

The Punchline

The internet killed catalogs the same way AI agents are (about to be) killing websites. The winners weren’t the ones with the prettiest catalogs. They were the ones who understood that the medium had fundamentally changed.

We’re at that same inflection point. Again.

The question isn’t whether this shift will happen. It’s whether you’ll be Sears or Amazon when it does.

I’m exploring how companies can position for this fundamental shift in how commerce works. If you’re thinking about this transition… whether you’re building the infrastructure, adapting your existing systems, or trying to figure out what the hell to do next… I’d love to connect.

Colin Steele has been consistently wrong about everything except the big stuff. He’s currently investigating what happens after websites while tinkering with mass-market media plays, drone-detecting edge AI systems, experimental TTRPGs, biosensors and occasionally writing code that doesn’t require FDA approval!

Works Researched

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Has anyone recovered from a 90+% traffic drop? : r/Blogging - Reddit, accessed October 23, 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/Blogging/comments/1j8853s/has_anyone_recovered_from_a_90_traffic_drop/
ChatGPT Crashes Chegg’s Stock 50 Percent in One Day, accessed October 23, 2025, https://www.onlineeducation.com/features/chatgpt-crashes-cheggs-stock
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AI and Antitrust Law: A Closer Look at “Chegg v. Google” - Ronin Legal, accessed October 23, 2025, https://roninlegalconsulting.com/ai-and-antitrust-law-a-closer-look-at-chegg-v-google/
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