What’s true, and what just sounds true.

"We've set up MCP, so we're agent-ready." That covers your own team's tools. It's a different job from the one a stranger's agent needs done.

MCP is genuinely useful, just not for the case most businesses think it covers. It's strong for an operator's own tools, a chat assistant working against your booking system, less so for a stranger's AI agent trying to book or buy from you. Both are real, but only one of them is what "agent-ready" usually means.

"WebMCP is the real answer for autonomous agents." Maybe eventually. Worth asking why it's needed at all.

WebMCP is genuinely early, worth flagging as unsettled rather than treated as decided either way. Even taken on its own terms, it's answering a narrower question than it sounds: how an AI agent copes with a web built for people, not what agentic commerce looks like if nobody had to cope with that at all.

"This is years away." Say a competitor already connected its facts. It's checkable now, not years from now.

This isn't a gradual interface upgrade a business adopts on its own schedule, the way a redesigned website rolls out over a quarter. It's a distribution shift that happens the moment an AI agent can check a business's facts and finds them connected, which is exactly why it can look sudden to one that hasn't done that work and unremarkable to one that has.

"Just add a chatbot" was never a strategy. Here's the argument for why.

A chat widget is a human-interface metaphor, a text box someone types into, bolted onto a business that hasn't changed underneath. It answers the question "how does a person talk to us" when the real question is whether the facts behind the widget are the ones an AI agent can act on.

"Bigger platforms will sort this out for us." Why we don't think that's coming, or coming for everyone.

The search era consolidated around a handful of gatekeepers, so it's a reasonable guess that agentic commerce will too, and that waiting for whichever one wins is the safe move. Genuinely autonomous, personal AI agents don't obviously converge that way, and waiting assumes a consolidation that might just not happen this time.

"Being mentioned by ChatGPT means you're winning." It doesn't, and treating it that way is costing you bookings.

In the search-results era, a mention at least came with a link, something a person could click and act on. A lot of today's chat mentions carry neither the link nor any path to book. That's not just as weak as old-style visibility. It's often hollower.

"AI can just read the page, you don't need structured data." It's solving the wrong layer of the problem.

The usual fix people reach for is extending the markup already on a page, more tags, richer fields, describing more of the business in the same place. That's still a page-shaped answer. The facts an AI agent needs don't have to live on a page at all, marked up or not.

"AI agents will replace your website." No, and here's what actually happens to it.

An AI agent shopping on someone's behalf doesn't need a website the way a person does. That's not the same as the website disappearing. Its job changes, from the primary place a sale happens to one surface among several reading from the same underlying facts.

"AI agents just means ChatGPT." It's a much wider, more personal category than that.

Most people picture one thing when they hear "AI agent": a chat window they open and type into, the way they'd open a search tab. That's one shape among many, and probably not the shape that ends up mattering most for buying and booking.

"Add an llms.txt file and you're SEO-optimised for AI." There's no ranking signal involved. What it's for is narrower and more specific.

An llms.txt file isn't a ranking mechanism, and treating it like a new kind of SEO misreads what it's for. What it can genuinely help with is narrower and more useful: telling an AI agent what a business can do, not making its content rank better anywhere.