@akshay_pachaar: Agents reach websites in 6 ways. (Google and Microsoft are betting on the same one.) Ask an agent to buy something and …

Agents reach websites in 6 ways. (Google and Microsoft are betting on the same one.) Ask an agent to buy something and watch it work. It screenshots the page, looks for something shaped like a button, clicks, and screenshots again to see what happened. You pay tokens every time it looks, and one redesign breaks the run. The site already knows what it can do. It has a search, a cart, a checkout, and none of that is written down anywhere a program can read. Here are the six, ordered from furthest from the interface to closest. 1) Raw API. Your script calls the backend with a key you manage. Precise and fast, though you had to find the endpoints yourself and the website never enters the picture. 2) Backend MCP server. The company describes its actions as named tools and your agent connects to them. Someone who understands the product wrote those definitions, so they name real actions instead of guessed ones. The interface is still skipped. 3) Computer use. The agent sees the live page as an image and clicks around it. Nothing to configure, but every look costs money and a layout change confuses it. 4) Browser automation over the DOM. The agent reads the page's underlying code instead of a picture of it. More reliable than pixels, except the tooling is generic, so the agent still infers meaning from anonymous divs and unlabeled buttons. 5) WebMCP, the one Chrome and Edge are building together. The page declares its own actions with names, plain-English descriptions, and typed inputs, and your agent calls them inside your live browser session. 6) The site's built-in assistant. The company ships a chat box, picks the model, and pays for the tokens. It works, and it is not your agent, so nothing it learns about you carries anywhere else. Three things vary across the six. Whose agent does the work, what you configure before anything happens, and what the agent receives when it arrives. Every option except one gives up at least one of the three. Raw API and backend MCP hand you typed actions and remove the website. Computer use asks for no setup and hands over pixels. The built-in assistant is precise and belongs to the vendor. WebMCP is the only one that keeps all three. Your own agent, nothing to configure, and named actions instead of guesswork. I wrote the full breakdown. The article is quoted below.