Opening a current account now takes a few minutes, all you need is a passport photo, a selfie and a few fields in a form designed to be simple, but, isn’t always.

Nobody meets anybody, and nobody minds. It feels effortless and actually designed to try and save you time. Ask the same person to move their pension or invest an inheritance through a similar online-only process and something changes. Suddenly they want a conversation, a human face and a phone number that gets answered by a real person. The current account setup, to you or I, probably feels like an errand, while making a decision regarding our finances is – and feels -, a lot more serious. Websites and the journeys we hope people take, as we all know, have to cater to both types of use case and more and that,is what the role of the website is today.

However, the errands are about to be delegated. The UK’s FCA expects consumers to hand more and more financial tasks to agents acting within agreed limits, and the Financial Stability Board, which coordinates regulators across major economies, is already drawing harder lines around agents that touch money. So the next visitor to your website may not be a person at all. It will be an agent, which has no interest in your hero image or strapline. OK, that’s a bit dramatic, but in a world where you aren’t catering to “people” on certain life admin tasks, how are we catering to this new audience via the website experience?

This is a strange new reader. It reads ten thousand pages before a human dismisses the cookie banner, has no sense of humour, takes everything literally, and is quite possibly the first customer in history to read the small print. For financial services, that is oddly good news for compliance. The agent rewards exactly what your compliance team has always asked for, which is consistent fees, unambiguous eligibility, risk warnings that say the same thing on every page etc. A fund manager whose factsheet and website disagree about charges will be found out quickly and we are already seeing discrepancies like this, appear in LLMs. Having the wrong information visible to people in LLMs is bad enough but imagine if an agent simply excludes you from a recommendation purely because there’s too much incorrect or contradictory information out there. For fintech and crypto, the agent may even be the customer. CoinDesk reported that one leading agent payment protocol moved about $24 million over 30 days in July, roughly what Visa handles in a minute. One exchange executive called this the Napster and LimeWire era, which is to say we are early in the process, a bit messy, but likely at the start of something big.

So will humans ever need the website again? In one vision of this future world, Google becomes the road agents travel, and the website becomes a data feed with a logo attached. However, you’ll be happy to hear that the realistic outlook, at least for now, is not all APIs, robots and machines. EY surveyed more than 18,000 people across 23 markets this year and found 49% had used AI to support savings and investment decisions in the past six months, yet only 16% had used AI that acts without human involvement, in any part of their lives. People are happy to be helped and far slower to be replaced, particularly when it is for the likes of their retirement. So as it stands, the human arrives later in the process, and with a different role. It is no longer “what do you offer?”, which the agent has already answered. The human role on significant life altering decisions is “are you real, and will you pick up when something goes wrong?”. That visit to the site when things get serious, needs a phone number, faces, evidence and a tone of voice, and must feel like the firm the agent described. I’d argue that means the role of the website, In a world of agents, actually needs to convey a more “human” feel, reassure audiences and still be available to call, contact or otherwise for reassurance.

This leaves a question every SEO team is quietly asking, who are we optimising for then? The answer is both, in layers. If the agent becomes the first reader, SEO accessibility becomes even more critical, ensuring information is easy to read, compare, cite and trust. Strategically, this is refreshingly dull for those out there already familiar with how important accessibility is to content, for both people and bots. Let the right bots in, since robots.txt now separates those that train models from those that fetch answers. Google says you need no special AI files, and John Mueller’s most basic advice is simply not to block agents. For the human, the brief has not changed i.e. reassurance, proof, a point of view, expertise etc. For agents? State the facts plainly, factually and consistently enough for a machine but still, still warmly enough for a person.

The website’s job is moving from shop window to ledger. The errands will increasingly belong to the agents. The meeting before the big money movements still belongs to us, at least for now…