A lot of what you've heard about agentic commerce isn't quite right.
Every myth in this hub comes from the same mistake: judging the future by how well it fits today's tools, a page, a widget, a chat window, a markup file, instead of asking what would make sense if you were starting clean. The actual destination underneath all of it is simpler than any of the myths: AI agents talking directly to data, not reading pages built for people.
7 min read
The pattern behind every myth here
A cottage owner near Ambleside reads three different pieces of advice in the same week: add a chat widget that answers questions, extend the page markup, wait for the platforms to sort it out. All three treat agentic commerce as something to bolt onto the website she already has. None of them ask the more basic question: if you were building this from nothing, would you even start with a page at all.
A page was always built for a person to scroll. A chat widget was always built for a person to type into. A markup file extends a system designed to help a search engine index pages for people to click through. Every one of those tools makes sense in a world where the thing at the other end is a person looking at a screen. An AI agent isn't that. A nicely formatted page doesn't help it. Neither does a widget it would have to talk to first. It needs the fact and the underlying data directly. Retrofitting agent capability onto page-shaped, chat-shaped, markup-shaped tools is the tell that a business is solving for today's habits, not tomorrow's actual mechanism.
What it looks like from a blank page
Say the cottage owner ignored all three pieces of advice and started from what an agent needs: how many dogs, which dates, what the cancellation policy really says, whether the kitchen fits a family of six. None of that needs a page. None of it needs a chat window. It needs to exist somewhere structured and current, so that whatever agent asks, whichever platform it's running on, gets the same real answer without inferring it from prose written for someone else. Not a smarter page, not a better widget. A business's own facts, made directly reachable.
Where this shows up for a business
Selfe connects a business's real systems, availability, pricing, policies, once, so its facts are already in the shape an agent needs rather than needing a page, a widget or a markup file translated into one. The rest of this hub goes through the specific myths, one at a time, and why each retrofit falls short of the thing it's standing in for.
Does this mean websites are pointless now?
No, a later piece in this hub covers that directly. The site's job changes, it doesn't disappear.
If none of the current tools are quite right, what should a business do?
Get the underlying facts right, structured and connected, rather than picking whichever page-shaped or chat-shaped tool is being pitched this month.
"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 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.
"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.