The Verge puts a finger on the central contradiction of the agentic era: agents are only as useful as the web is open to them, and publishers are increasingly unwilling to subsidize that usefulness for free. In our view this is the second act of the crawler wars — only now the stakes are transactions and revenue, not just search snippets. Expect the standoff to end not with blanket blocking but with paid access tiers and licensing deals, which conveniently favor giants like OpenAI and Google over smaller players. The uncomfortable follow-up: if most of the web walls itself off, agents risk becoming just another front-end for a handful of walled gardens.