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WebMCP is available for early preview

developer.chrome.com

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Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#41

Post by avaer »

BeefySwain wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here? Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both. If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

In a nutshell: Google wants your websites to be more easily used by the agents they are putting in the browser and other products.

They own the user layer and models, and get to decide if your product will be used.

Think search monopoly, except your site doesn't even exist as far as users are concerned, it's only used via an agent, and only if Google allows.

The work of implementing this is on you. Google is building the hooks into the browser for you to do it; that's WebMCP.

It's all opaque; any oopsies/dark patterns will be blamed on the AI. The profits (and future ad revenue charged for sites to show up on the LLM's radar) will be claimed by Google.

The other AI companies are on board with this plan. Any questions?

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#42

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

yk wrote: post #28

Hey, it's the semantic web, but with ~~XML~~, ~~AJAX~~, ~~Blockchain~~, Ai! Well, it has precisely the problem of the semantic web, it asks the website to declare in a machine readable format what the website does. Now, llms are kinda the tool to interface to everybody using a somewhat different standard, and this doesn't need everybody to hop on the bandwagon, so perhaps this is the time where it is different.

There's nothing wrong with XML.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#43

Post by akersten »

cameldrv wrote: post #38
akersten wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember discussions around the meaning of `User-Agent` and why it was important that we include it in HTTP headers. Back before it was locked to `Chromium (Gecko; Mozilla 4.0/NetScape; 147.01 ...)`. We talked about a magical future where your PDA, car, or autonomous toaster could be browsing the web on your behalf, and consuming (or not consuming) the delivered HTML as necessary. Back when we named…

Me too but it died when ads became the currency of the web. If the reason the site exists is to use ads, they’re not going to let you use an user agent that doesn’t display the ads.

> If the reason the site exists is to use ads, they’re not going to let you use an user agent that doesn’t display the ads.

They've been giving it the old college try for the better part of two decades and the only website I've had to train myself not to visit is Twitch, whose ads have invaded my sightline one time too many, and I conceded that particular adblocking battle. I don't get the sense that it's high on the priority list for most sites out there (knock on wood).

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#44

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

trollbridge wrote: post #29
thayne wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I have had the problem of "I want to find the cheapest flight that leaves during this range of dates, and returns during this range of dates, but isn't early in the morning or late at night, and includes additional fees for the luggage I need in the price comparison" and current search tools can't do that very well. I'm not very optimistic WebMCP would solve that though.

matrix.ita does this very well, and has been doing so for nearly 3 decades.

Do you mean this website? https://matrix.itasoftware.com

I dind't know about it, just checked it out for a flight I'll buy soon, and has almost no direct flights which I know exist because they're on skyscanner...

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#45

Post by nkassis »

akersten wrote: post #36
BeefySwain wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here? Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both. If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

I'm old enough to remember discussions around the meaning of `User-Agent` and why it was important that we include it in HTTP headers. Back before it was locked to `Chromium (Gecko; Mozilla 4.0/NetScape; 147.01 ...)`. We talked about a magical future where your PDA, car, or autonomous toaster could be browsing the web on your behalf, and consuming (or not consuming) the delivered HTML as necessary. Back when we named…

Just like then we were naive about folks not abusing these things to the point of making everyone need to block them to oblivion. I think we are relearning these lessons 30 years later.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#46

Post by arjunchint »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #35
arjunchint wrote: post #12

Majority of sites don't even expose accessibility functionalities, and for WebMCP you have to expose and maintain internal APIs per page. This opens the site up to abuse/scraping/etc. Thats why I dont see this standard going to takeoff. Google put it out there to see uptake. Its really fun to talk about but will be forgotten by end of year is my hot take. Rather what I think will be the future is that each website wi…

> for WebMCP you have to expose and maintain internal APIs per page Perhaps. I think an API for the session is probably the root concern. Page specific is nice to have. You say it like it's a bad thing. But ideally this also brings clarity & purpose to your own API design too! Ideally there is conjunct purpose! And perhaps shared mechanism! > This opens the site up to abuse/scraping/etc. In general it bothers me that…

> You say it like it's a bad thing. But ideally this also brings clarity & purpose to your own API design too! Ideally there is conjunct purpose! And perhaps shared mechanism!

I update my website multiple times a day. I want to have as much decoupling as possible. Everytime I update internal API, I dont want to think of having to also update this WebMCP config.

Basically I have to put in work setting up WebMCP, so that Google can have a better agent that disintermediates my site.

> Trying to keep users from seeing what data they want is, generally, not something I favor.

This is literally the whole cat and mouse game of scraping and web automation, sites clearly want to protect their moat and differentiators. LinkedIn/X/Google literally sue people for scraping, I don't think they themselves are going to package all this data as a WebMCP endpoint for easy scraping.

Regardless of your preferences/ideals, the ecosystem is not going to change overnight due to hype about agents.

> Your site running its own agent is going to take a lot of resources

A lot of sites already expose chatbots, its trivial to rate limit and captcha on abuse detection

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#48

Post by candiddevmike »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #35
arjunchint wrote: post #12

Majority of sites don't even expose accessibility functionalities, and for WebMCP you have to expose and maintain internal APIs per page. This opens the site up to abuse/scraping/etc. Thats why I dont see this standard going to takeoff. Google put it out there to see uptake. Its really fun to talk about but will be forgotten by end of year is my hot take. Rather what I think will be the future is that each website wi…

> for WebMCP you have to expose and maintain internal APIs per page Perhaps. I think an API for the session is probably the root concern. Page specific is nice to have. You say it like it's a bad thing. But ideally this also brings clarity & purpose to your own API design too! Ideally there is conjunct purpose! And perhaps shared mechanism! > This opens the site up to abuse/scraping/etc. In general it bothers me that…

But we have OpenAPI at home

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#49

Post by SilverElfin »

BeefySwain wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what the hell is going on here? Do websites want to prevent automated tooling, as indicated by everyone putting everything behind Cloudfare and CAPTCHAs since forever, or do websites want you to be able to automate things? Because I don't see how you can have both. If I'm using Selenium it's a problem, but if I'm using Claude it's fine??

I feel like this is a way to ultimately limit the ability to scrape but also the ability to use your own AI agent to take actions across the internet for you. Like how Amazon doesn’t let your agent to shop their site for you, but they’ll happily scrape every competitor’s website to enforce their anti competitive price fixing scheme. They want to allow and deny access on their terms.

WebMCP will become another channel controlled by big tech and it’ll come with controls. First they’ll lure people to use this method for the situations they want to allow, and then they’ll block everything else.

Re: WebMCP is available for early preview

#50

Post by kylecazar »

candiddevmike wrote: post #39
victorbjorklund wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wanna let you use the service the way they want. An e-commerce? Wanna automate buying your stuff - probably something they wanna allow under controlled forms Wanna scrape the site to compare prices? Maybe less so.

A brave new world for fraud and returns. Also I just recently noticed Chrome now has a Klarna/BNPL thing as a built in payments option that I never asked for...

Yeah it's a payment method they added to Google Pay (Google Wallet? I don't know anymore). You can turn it off in autofill settings.
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