DEV Community: Giuseppe Socci

"A reality was not given to us": the web that is coming does not exist yet — an agent will build it for you

Giuseppe Socci — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:00:19 +0000

Because a reality wasn't given to us and is not there; but we have to make it ourselves, if we want to be; and it will never be one for ever, but constant and infinitely changeable.

Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand
Pirandello wrote this about the human condition. He didn't know he was describing the future of the internet.

The web we know is about to disappear
Not slowly. Not gradually. The web page, as the default unit of human navigation, is about to disappear: it will strip itself of everything we call "interface" and what remains will be only what it always was underneath — data, structure, instruction.

The enticing homepages. The banners. The product carousels engineered by UX teams to capture attention in the first second and a half. The brand colors. The call-to-action buttons optimized for conversion rate. All of this is designed for a human eye that navigates alone.

That eye is about to delegate.

The agent that browses for you
Imagine you want to buy a pair of shoes. Today you open a browser, search, filter, compare, go back, reopen the tab you closed, forget what you were looking for, start again.

In a few years — maybe less — you will tell the agent what you want. The agent will already know that you have wide feet, that you prefer leather to synthetic, that you're looking for something for a wedding in June but deep down you want something that works afterward too. It will know that today you're in a practical mood, not an aspirational one. That you've spent a lot this month.

The agent won't open a homepage. It will query a data structure. It will receive prices, availability, variants, return policies. It will build for you — and only for you, and only in that moment — a presentation tailored to measure. Colors that belong to you. Texts that speak your language. Images generated for your aesthetic sensibility of that day.

The same store. Five billion different versions. One for each person, one for each moment.

One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand — applied to the web
Pirandello imagined a man who discovers he has as many faces as there are people looking at him. Vitangelo Moscarda is not one — he is one hundred thousand, one for every other person's gaze. And he goes mad trying to understand which one is real.

The agentic web resolves this paradox by reversing it.

It's not you who has one hundred thousand faces in the eyes of others. It is the world that will have one hundred thousand faces in your eyes. Every site, every store, every piece of content will be built by the agent in your image and likeness — not fixed and identity-bound, but temporary, seasonal, mood-dependent. Faithful to who you are in that precise instant.

Because a reality wasn't given to us and is not there.

There is no "true" web page. There is no "right" interface. There is only the construction — continuous, personal, unrepeatable.

What remains when the frontend disappears
If the agent builds the interface, what must the merchant provide?
Not design. Not copy. Not a mobile-optimized WordPress theme. They must provide instructions.

Instructions about what they sell. At what price. With what constraints. What values the brand holds. What is available right now, in this moment — not what was available yesterday when the crawler last updated the index. What it means to buy from them — the story, the guarantee, the meaning.

The merchant of the future doesn't manage a storefront. They manage a source of truth — structured, machine-readable, always current. The agent does the rest.

This future will not be served by prettier landing pages. It will be served by APIs, product feeds, schema.org metadata, MCP-compatible interfaces, real-time availability endpoints, signed policies, and machine-readable brand constraints. The stack already exists in pieces — what is missing is the layer that makes it coherent and discoverable.
This is the collapse of the frontend. HTML, CSS, JavaScript as presentation layers become optional. What remains is raw data — and raw data must be impeccable.

The vehicle remains the web. But a stripped web.
There is an obvious objection: the web won't disappear. True.

The protocol remains. HTTP remains. URLs remain. But what travels on that protocol changes its nature.

Today a web page is a document — designed to be read by a human eye, built with layers of presentation over layers of content over layers of structure. Tomorrow a web page is an interface for agents — an endpoint that responds to structured queries, returns normalized data, declares its own capabilities in a discovery document.

The graphics don't disappear — they are generated downstream, by the agent, for the human. But they don't live on the merchant's server. They live in the agent, constructed at the moment, on measure.

The devices through which all of this will arrive have probably not been perfected yet. Glasses. Ambient voice interfaces. Surfaces we don't yet know how to imagine. The agentic web doesn't need a screen — it needs a connection and a structure.

The paradox of discovery
There is a question that keeps coming back to me as I think about all of this.

If the agent filters the world according to who I am, how will I find what I don't know I want?

Discovery — the accidental encounter with a store you weren't looking for, the book that changed your life found by mistake, the brand whose existence you didn't know — has always been a function of the web's chaos. Of the search engine's imperfection. Of the banner that for once caught something true.

A perfectly aligned agent is also an agent that protects you from surprise. From dissonance. From chance.

This is the paradox of total personalization: the more the world is built for you, the less it truly belongs to you. Because it is you who builds it — or rather, it is your past history that builds it, not who you could become.

This is the problem no one has yet solved. Perhaps it is the most human problem of all.

…reality is not a thing conferred upon us or which exists; it is something that we have to manufacture ourselves."
Luigi Pirandello, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

Pirandello was talking about the human condition. He was describing the internet.

Giuseppe Socci — bridge.kalicart.com | github.com/giuseppesocci-bot/kalicart-bridge

Your WooCommerce store is invisible to AI shopping agents. Here's how to fix it.

Giuseppe Socci — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:34:36 +0000

AI shopping agents are already buying things on behalf of real users. ChatGPT Shopping has been live since September 2025. Google announced Universal Cart at I/O 2026 — a persistent cross-merchant cart spanning Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail. The underlying standard is UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol).
None of this works with a standard WooCommerce store.

What AI agents actually do when they shop
When a user asks ChatGPT "find me a waterproof jacket under €150 in size M", the agent doesn't open a browser and scroll through your homepage. It queries structured data sources — product feeds, APIs, discovery endpoints. If your store doesn't have one, it doesn't exist.
The agent needs to answer machine questions:

What's the exact current price?
Is size M actually in stock right now, or is it backordered?
Does this product have variants? Which ones are available?
Is there a discount I can apply at checkout?
How do I initiate a purchase session?

A standard WooCommerce store can't answer any of these questions in a machine-readable way. The data is there — buried in the database — but there's no structured API surface for an agent to consume.
This is the gap. And it's about to matter a lot.

What's shipping right now
ChatGPT Shopping — live since September 2025, 900M weekly users. Queries structured product feeds. Non-Shopify merchants need an ACP-compliant product feed to appear.
Google AI Mode — replaces the classic search results page with a structured product panel. Reasons over the Shopping Graph to match intent, not just keywords. Feed completeness and live data are the ranking signals — not SEO.
Google Universal Cart — announced at I/O 2026. Cross-merchant persistent cart across Search, Gemini, YouTube, Gmail. Powered by UCP. Initial rollout to Shopify merchants and major US retailers.
WooCommerce MCP — shipped in WooCommerce 10.3 (Oct 2025), finalized in 10.7. Lets AI assistants interact with WooCommerce stores via Model Context Protocol. Current focus: store management (products, orders). Consumer shopping via MCP is the stated next step.
The pattern is clear: every major AI platform is building a commerce layer, and they're all pulling from structured data. The stores with complete, machine-readable catalogs get surfaced. The rest don't.

The WooCommerce problem
WooCommerce powers ~28% of global online stores. Almost none of it is natively readable by AI agents.
The WooCommerce REST API exists, but it's designed for store management — not for agent consumption. It requires authentication, returns data in a format agents don't expect, and has no discovery mechanism. An agent landing on a WooCommerce storefront has no standardized way to find the catalog, understand its structure, or initiate a purchase.
Shopify solved this with their managed agentic stack. WooCommerce, being open-source, is taking the composable path — which means the solution space is open for plugins.

What a machine-readable WooCommerce store looks like
I've been building KaliCart Bridge — a free WooCommerce plugin that exposes your live catalog as a normalized REST API for AI agents.
Here's what it adds to a standard WooCommerce store:
Discovery signals — A <link rel="kalicart-agent"> in the page <head>tells any agent where to start. /.well-known/kalicart-bridge and /.well-known/ucp provide standardized discovery files. robots.txt explicitly allows the catalog endpoints.
Structured catalog API —/wp-json/kalicart/v1/discovery is the entry point. From there, agents can search with real filters (category, gender, color, on_sale, in_stock, price range), get paginated product lists, fetch individual products with full variations, and navigate the category tree.
Normalized product data — every product exposes:

{
  "price": {
    "current": 89.00,
    "regular": 110.00,
    "on_sale": true,
    "discount_pct": 19.1,
    "encoding": "decimal_major_units",
    "display": "89,00 €",
    "vat_included": true
  },
  "stock": {
    "in_stock": true,
    "availability_status": "in_stock",
    "quantity": 14,
    "quantity_tracked": true,
    "backorder_allowed": false
  },
  "variants": [...],
  "barcodes": [{ "type": "EAN", "value": "1234567890123" }],
  "metadata": {
    "purchase_readiness": "direct_cart_possible",
    "stock_confidence": "numeric_stock_quantity"
  }
}

UCP compatibility — /.well-known/ucp declares dev.ucp.shopping.catalog.search and dev.ucp.shopping.catalog.lookup capabilities. Stock uses UCP-standard availability_status values. Price encoding is explicit (decimal_major_units) with a conversion hint for UCP minor units.
Checkout sessions — optional. Agents can create multi-product sessions returning cart_url and checkout_url. The human pays on WooCommerce. The merchant stays Merchant of Record.
No LLM. No cloud. No API key. Everything runs on your server.

The discovery flow
An agent that encounters a KaliCart Bridge store follows this path:

1. GET page HTML → finds
GET /wp-json/kalicart/v1/discovery → reads capabilities, filters, UCP profile, checkout policy
GET /wp-json/kalicart/v1/catalog/search?q=waterproof+jacket&in_stock=true&max_price=150
GET /wp-json/kalicart/v1/catalog/product/{id} → full variants for variable products
POST /wp-json/kalicart/v1/checkout/session → returns cart_url + checkout_url Five requests from zero knowledge to checkout-ready. No scraping, no guessing, no hallucinated prices.

Catalog health
The plugin also adds a health dashboard in WP Admin. Products are scored 0–100 based on data completeness. Deductions: NO_TITLE (−25), NO_DESCRIPTION (−30), NO_CATEGORY (−30), ZERO_PRICE (−25), NO_IMAGE (−8), NO_SKU (−4).
Products with blocking issues are quarantined — they don't appear in agent responses until fixed. The dashboard shows exactly what's wrong and links directly to filtered product lists for remediation.
This turns out to be useful even outside the agent context — most WooCommerce stores have a tail of products with incomplete data that nobody ever audits.

Where things are headed
The checkout layer (UCP + AP2) is still early — autonomous checkout at scale is probably 12–18 months away for the average merchant. But the discovery layer is live now.
Google AI Mode is already routing product searches away from classic results. ChatGPT Shopping is already surfacing products from structured feeds. The stores that are machine-readable today will have indexed history, agent familiarity, and structured data quality by the time autonomous checkout becomes mainstream.
The window to get ahead is now, not when it's obvious.

Try it

Plugin + docs: bridge.kalicart.com
GitHub: github.com/giuseppesocci-bot/kalicart-bridge
Live discovery endpoint: project2209.com/wp-json/kalicart/v1/discovery