Picture a purchase that will be entirely unremarkable in 2027. My agent knows my shoe size, my weekly mileage and my dislike of neon colours. I tell it I need new running shoes, budget 180 euros, by Friday. It reads 40 product feeds, parses a dozen product videos, checks return rates and delivery times, compares prices across three shops and orders. I get a summary and a parcel. Between my intent and the transaction there was not a single search results page.

For someone who has been buying clicks since 2008, that is a strange feeling. For 18 years the deal was simple: a human types a keyword, the machine shows ten blue links and a few ads, the best bidder with the best ad wins the attention. An entire industry was built on that deal, my career included. That deal is running out right now, and faster than an annual budget cycle can react.

So I wrote down what I believe. Six sentences, deliberately pointed, and written in English from the outset, because they should work as a basis for an international discipline. Here they are, with the context for why every single one of them is distilled from 18 years of performance marketing.

The Agentic Manifest

  1. Agents are the new Interface.
  2. Intent is the new Keyword.
  3. Context is the new Ranking.
  4. Trust is the new Currency.
  5. Autonomy is the new Standard.
  6. Value is the only Metric.

Agents are the new Interface.

Browser, search results page, app: those were the layers between intent and transaction, and we did marketing on every one of them. Now a new layer is pushing in front of them, and it covers all the others. The agent reads the search results, the agent scrolls the feed, the agent opens the product page. What the human sees: nothing.

Alibaba showed with Qwen how seriously the platforms take this: 430 million dollars in incentives to get people to order bubble tea through the AI app. The result, by Alibaba’s own account: 7x more active users. That was an interface shift, bought outright and announced in advance. Anyone optimising today for humans with a mouse and a thumb is optimising for an interface that is moving into the second row.

Intent is the new Keyword.

Keywords were only ever approximations. “running shoes men size 44” is a crutch a human uses to squeeze a complex intent into a search box. Half the SEA discipline of the past 20 years consisted of reconstructing the real intent from that crutch: match types, audiences, smart bidding, all of it reconstruction tooling.

The agent brings the intent with it, in full. Budget, context, preferences, deadline, history. The reconstruction work falls away, and with it a good part of what we have been calling “targeting”. What remains is the question of whether your offer can serve a precisely stated intent. That is a harder test than any keyword matching.

Context is the new Ranking.

Since Gemini Embedding 2, text, images, video, audio and PDFs all move into a single index. An agent reads your product description, parses your product video, transcribes the claim from your ad spot and pages through the data sheet. Every content format becomes a ranking signal, and the ranking itself is created inside the agent’s context window: for exactly this one query, for exactly this one customer.

Feed quality is the new UX design. Anyone who still treats their product feed as an annoying SEO appendage is feeding the most important salesperson of the coming years with junk data.

Trust is the new Currency.

A human can occasionally be convinced by a landing page full of superlatives. An agent checks. Return rates, review consistency, price history, whether the promised delivery time held across the last 500 orders. And an agent that has once caught a false stock level remembers it. Machines are considerably worse at forgetting than customers.

Brands have always asserted trust: in claims, in campaigns, in brand films. From now on, trust gets verified by machine. For honest providers that is the best news in years. For everyone else it is a problem that media budget solves remarkably badly.

Autonomy is the new Standard.

The protocols for agentic payment are here, the agentic checkouts are coming. The path from recommendation to transaction becomes machine-run end to end, and the human moves to where they belong: to the edges of the system. Setting budget limits, excluding brands, stepping in when it counts. Human-on-the-Loop, taken literally.

For retailers that means: a checkout that assumes a human with a mouse, patience and a tolerance for cookie banners is simply unusable for agents. Executable by Design is an infrastructure requirement from now on.

Value is the only Metric.

Impressions, CTR, even the venerable CPC: those are metrics from a world in which attention was the scarce resource. Instead of attention, an agent brings a task, and that is exactly what gets measured: whether it was solved, at what price, with what outcome for the customer.

Budgets follow that logic faster than dashboards get rebuilt. Follow the Money.

The Agentic Credo

From the six observations I have drawn three working philosophies, for myself and for everyone who works with me. Deliberately phrased as antitheses, because a position only becomes sharp where it draws a line:

We don’t stop at clicks. We build for agents. The click remains craft and pays for the present. Whether we exist in the agent funnel at all is decided by the infrastructure behind it: feed, data, APIs.

We don’t chase attention. We earn recommendation. Attention can be bought, with budget and repetition. A recommendation is granted by the agent after it has checked the signals, and that check is incorruptible.

We don’t sell products. We enable decisions. The agent makes a decision for its human. Whoever supplies the best basis for that decision (data, evidence, availability) wins the purchase, without a single sales conversation.

Over the next few years, the purchase runs through two funnels at once: one for humans, with emotion, story and brand; one for agents, with structure, specs and machine-readable signals. We have commanded the first for 18 years, the second is being built right now, and the weight is shifting.

Agentic Principles: what this means for Monday

Manifestos exaggerate, that comes with the genre. In 2030 there will still be people strolling through shops on a Saturday and seeing ads, voluntarily even. But four or five of the six manifest sentences will hold, and the infrastructure for them is already in place today. Which is why the sentences translate into six work orders:

Be discoverable by Agents. Structured data, clean feeds, machine-readable content. If the agent can parse you technically, you exist.

Be recommendable by Data. The recommendation comes out of verifiable signals. Feed them: reviews, availability, consistent product data across every format.

Be executable by Design. APIs instead of form hurdles. The path from recommendation to order has to work without human patience.

Be verifiable by Proof. Every claim needs evidence that can be checked. Agents reward providers whose promises survive that check.

Be preferred by Outcome. The last transaction is the ranking signal for the next one. Deliver well, and the agent comes back.

Be irreplaceable by Value. If your product is interchangeable, the agent decides on price. If it does what no other product does, it decides for you.

At SlopeLift in 2014 we said “Manufaktur” (workshop) for what is today called Human-on-the-Loop: machines take over execution, humans hold context, strategy and responsibility. Back then it was a thesis about bid management scripts. Today it is the blueprint for a commerce world in which agents buy.

And that is exactly where the circle closes. An agent can parse feeds, negotiate prices and handle checkouts. A position needs a human who signs it and defends it when it matters. That is why this manifest carries my name and not a model name. Human-on-the-Loop starts with campaign management and does not stop anywhere near your own positioning.

The six sentences now live on fischerfl.at, and I will maintain them like a product feed: keep them current, sharpen them, clear a line out when reality has overtaken it. A manifesto that still wants to hold word for word in 2030 was probably already too vague in 2026. Disagreement is explicitly welcome.

Agents are already buying. The question is whether they can buy from you.