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

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: [e-mail]

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.