Agent-direct

Agent-direct (adjective): when an AI agent books, orders or buys on a business's own website instead of through a marketplace.

Discovery is moving from people reading search results to assistants reading and acting on the web. Google's AI Mode already books restaurant tables, ordering runs inside ChatGPT and Claude, and the checkout protocols the platforms published in 2025 and 2026 are designed for agents, not people.

Every one of those transactions needs a path. Today the default path runs through a marketplace, because that is who the platforms partnered with first. When an agent orders through a delivery app, the restaurant pays the app's commission. When it books through a reservation marketplace, the restaurant pays per cover. When it does either on the restaurant's own site, it pays nothing.

The book-direct war, replayed

Hotels spent twenty years fighting online travel agencies with "book direct". Restaurants, salons, tour operators and clinics are about to fight the same war, except the guest is an agent and the fight is over which site the agent can read and use.

What makes a site agent-direct

• Reachable. robots.txt and the hosting firewall let AI crawlers in.
• Readable. Structured data, hours, address, phone, and a menu as text rather than a PDF or an image.
• Actionable. A booking or ordering path on the business's own domain that an agent can complete.
• Cited. When people ask an assistant, it sends them to the business's site, not to a marketplace page about it.

The Direct Index measures exactly those four things, city by city, and the free scanner tells any owner where they stand in under a minute.