Why I Built IntentQL: A Protocol for AI Agents to Use the Web Natively

#aiagents #webdev #showdev

For years, web scraping has been the duct tape behind AI agents trying to interact with websites. It works—until it doesn't. HTML changes, pages lag, and what should be a 100ms query becomes a 4-second screen-parsing mess.

I believe the web needs native infrastructure for agents. Just as robots.txt standardized how crawlers engage with websites, it's time for something similar for AI agents: a declarative, structured protocol.

So I built IntentQL.

🔧 The Problem: Scraping Is a Bottleneck

When an AI agent wants to book a hotel, it doesn't "understand" the page—it scrapes it. That means parsing layout-heavy HTML, guessing at form inputs, and praying nothing broke.

A recent test showed:

Scraping the hotel booking UI took 4.46 seconds

IntentQL took 0.049 seconds

That's a 91x performance improvement. But more importantly, it's stable. HTML can change without breaking the contract.

🌐 What Is IntentQL?

IntentQL is a declarative JSON endpoint websites can serve (like Agent.json) to expose agent-compatible actions. These actions are structured, timestamped, and composable.

An agent can ask: "What can I do here?" — and get a machine-readable list of intents like:

{
"intents": [
{
"name": "book_room",
"description": "Book a hotel room",
"parameters": ["check_in", "check_out"]
}
]
}

No scraping. No guessing. No fragility.

🚀 Live Demo

I built a live side-by-side demo:

https://widget-k3vj-a6qvo466v-lee-manleys-projects.vercel.app/

Left side: full HTML scraping

Right side: direct JSON query using IntentQL

Includes timestamps + graphics

Try it. Embed it. Share it. This is how agents should interact with the web.

🚧 Who Is This For?

Browser teams (Opera, Arc, Perplexity): no more reverse-engineering

Web devs: expose actions natively without API bloat

Standards bodies: time to start the conversation

If you're working on agent-first experiences, this is the missing layer.

👀 What Happens Next?

I'm sharing this across Hacker News, Twitter, and with the W3C AI Agent Protocol community. This isn't a product pitch—it's infrastructure. I'm here to help define the standard.

Spec: https://intentql.dev
Contact: lee@intentql.dev

Want to implement this on your site? There's a one-file guide. Need help? I offer consulting.

Let's give AI agents a better way to use the web.

Built in the open. Maintained at intentql.dev.