WebMCP: Let AI Agents pay you money

A 29-minute episode of Greg Isenberg’s show. His premise is that AI agents are about to become a new kind of visitor on the web, browsing and buying for people, and the web isn’t built for them. His returning guest, Vinny, explains WebMCP, an experimental browser feature from Google and Microsoft that lets a website hand an agent a short list of things it can do there: search, book, add to cart.

Vinny demonstrates it on an espresso-gear shop he built. His own agent compares two machines against his counter width and drinks, picks accessories that fit, adds one to the cart and applies a coupon, while he watches the page change. Without it, an agent has to read the whole page’s code or work from screenshots, which is slow and fragile. Two features matter most to him. The tools can depend on state, so a logged-in visitor’s agent gets more of them. And because the agent works inside the browser session, the login comes for free, with no API keys or separate server to authenticate against. He places it on a map running from headless options (a raw API, an MCP server) through computer use to the in-app agent a company builds itself, and sees it as the middle ground: users bring the agent they already have, the site keeps its visual interface, and the site doesn’t pay for the tokens. His first markets are complicated shopping where parts must fit, admin consoles, read-only tools in regulated industries such as banking, and internal tools.

Isenberg closes with two businesses a semi-technical founder could start. A WebMCP conversion agency would make ordinary local businesses (law firms, dentists, HVAC) agent-ready, with a setup fee and a monthly retainer for monitoring. An agent mystery shopper would run agents through a client’s key journeys (booking a consultation, filing a claim, buying a hoodie), report where they get stuck, and turn the repeated fixes into software. Both men make the case for building while the technology is still experimental, because that is when the window is open.

WebMCP is real and as described: a proposed standard developed by Google and Microsoft in a W3C community group, with an early preview in Chrome announced in February 2026, behind a flag. It is still a trial, and its interface is expected to change before general release, which is the risk the episode’s own advice runs into.