The reverse is happening in many places: since agents don't view ads or pay, and do steal content, there's a huge demand to block them. Cloudflare now offer this as a service.
replyNot that useful when large swathes of the population are unemployed, which is where this is all aiming.
replyDo you have even an example of this (one should ask for measurable data openness) or are you just making stuff up? Everything around has/is becoming more closed and I have one example: Reddit. It is not impossible to read without an account (account-walled).
replyI have a friend who works in B2B eCommerce specifically with some projects in D2C and they're saying that SEO is mostly a dead end now. It's all about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
replySo if someone is looking for a 18V cordless drill for drilling into concrete, they'll most likely ask an agent. If your site has bad AEO/GEO, the product pages are either impossible to read by an agent or the data is badly formatted -> the agent won't recommend your product, resulting in a lost sale.
Like SEO gave us OpenGraph and similar common tools to provide data in a machine readable form, AEO/GEO will force data to be readable by agents.
Some sites like Consumer Reports block all crawlers, so we'll see how that goes for them.