The term “agent experience” (AX) was popularized in January 2025 by Matt Biilmann, CEO of the developer platform Netlify. For its first year or so, AX was mostly discussed as a successor to “developer experience” (DX): if AI agents were going to help build and deploy software, then those platforms needed to become easier for agents to use.
Over a year later, we’re seeing agents increasingly become users of websites and apps. So AX is now evolving into a new branch of user experience (UX).
Biilmann himself acknowledged this in a one-year anniversary post for the term, noting that “we’ll go from a world where AX is primarily understood as a new type of developer experience, to a world where AX will be as generally applicable as UX itself.”
AX was the new DX. Now AX is becoming the new UX.
I’ve been calling this new era of human/agent interactivity the agentic web. In a funny way, it’s an inversion of the “read/write web” trend that I chronicled in a previous era. In Web 2.0, the key shift was (human) users going from simply consuming the web to producing it too. But in the age of generative AI, agents began by “writing” to the web (developing websites and apps) and have now moved to the “reading” part (using those sites and apps, on behalf of human users). Hence the shift from DX to UX.
As noted, the main reason for this shift is that AI agents are now active users of the web. In fact, Google just updated its guidelines for website operators, asking us to “build agent-friendly websites” now.
Another way to put this is to design your website with “agent usability” in mind. Build for how agents use your website or app, in addition to how your fellow humans use it.
If you want to go even further, and add more acronyms, I quite like this framing from Liad Yosef, a co-creator of MCP Apps:
The future of UX comes down to two things:
1. How an agent experiences your product
2. How a human experiences that agent
UX = AX + UAX
But let’s stick with AX to keep things simple 🙂 Speaking of acronyms…
ASO as the new SEO
Since we’re increasingly focused on non-human visitors to our websites and apps, naturally the massive SEO industry has become laser focused on how to optimize for this new type of user. A big wake-up call to this industry was the recent news that Adobe has completed its acquisition of the SEO firm Semrush.
Adobe positioned the acquisition as “enhancing its ability to offer businesses more capabilities to drive discoverability and conversion as AI interfaces and agents become a primary way for customers to discover, evaluate and engage brands.” (emphasis mine)
According to Adobe, SEO has now become ASO (agentic search optimization). Actually, there are several other acronyms vying for primacy among Adobe’s customer base, such as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Search Optimization (ASO) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).
Whatever the winning acronym turns out to be, the underlying trend is clear: marketers are no longer optimizing only for human searchers. They are optimizing for AI-mediated discovery and decision-making. Longer term, we’ll be optimizing for more and more autonomous agents, which may even have minimal human oversight.
In response to the Adobe-Semrush news, Amanda Pressner Kreuser — managing partner of a content marketing agency called Masthead — wrote on LinkedIn that “your content and marketing teams need to skill up in areas they’ve never touched before, like structured data, schema markup, product feed architecture.”
As Kreuser noted, most SEO professionals are already skilled in structuring content. But, she added, “most SEO people are execution-focused, not strategy-focused, and ASO is a strategy problem.”
I would go further. This isn’t just a question of “how do we optimize content for AI agents?” The critical question now, from a marketing and design point of view, is “how do we design systems that AI agents can actually use?”
This brings us back to AX, agent experience. In the agentic web era, your website is no longer just a destination — it’s an interface that ideally exposes capabilities that agents can use. Which is why agent workflows are so important to design for and test now.
This is precisely what I now offer through my Agent Experience Assessment: a hands-on review of how AI agents discover, understand, and interact with your website, content, documentation, APIs, and product surfaces.
The End of a Web Development Era
The shift in focus from DX to UX — except now a UX for humans and agents — also signals the end of an era in web development. The Javascript framework era, as I think we can now call the 2010s and early 2020s, was dominated by DX: making the developer’s life easier by abstracting away as much complexity as possible. The problem, of course, was that much of the benefits of DX came at the expense of users: often including a massive JS payload that had to be downloaded by the client before someone could even use your app.
JS framework bloat is still an issue for human users, but now the focus is moving back to the underlying semantic structure of a website — because that’s how machines will interact with it.
Let’s put it this way: agents don’t need fancy JavaScript features; they need structure, state, permissions, and reliable ways to retrieve or act.
When I interviewed Matt Biilmann about AX in early 2025, he told me that the genesis of the term was Netlify’s integration with ChatGPT — which in turn led his company to the realization that “we needed to give it [ChatGPT] some specific flows around authentication and handovers and so on.”
At that point, AI systems were being used to help create websites via back-and-forth prompting. That trend has only accelerated over the past year and a quarter. It’s now common for developers (and increasingly, normal web users) to deploy a team of agents to build a website for them — often with little to no input from the “developer,” other than the starting prompt. So flows like authentication and handovers are now almost completely handled by agents.
This has turned into an awesome business for Netlify and similar web development platforms, like Vercel and Cloudflare. Now that anyone can be a developer, there’s been a surge in new users for all these companies.
To be frank, it doesn’t really matter now what the developer’s experience is, since everything has been abstracted away by AI. You could even argue that DX is merely a question of how easy it is to talk to an AI system!
I’m exaggerating a little, but the point is this: the focus has rightly shifted back to the user experience. Increasingly, that will primarily be about how agents use your site or app (on behalf of humans).
It’s time to go beyond traditional UX
Here’s my current definition of AX:
Agent Experience (AX) is how well AI agents can discover, understand, and interact with your website, product, content, and digital services.
That includes visibility, but it’s much more than that. The more important part of AX is whether agents can actually use your website, app or digital product.
To explore this further, you can request my 36-page Agentic Web Playbook, or read more about my Agent Experience Assessment.
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