Your customer sent a robot, and it gave up
People have started delegating errands — book this, order that — to AI assistants. Tested against 144 real websites, the best of them finished a third of the jobs. The reasons they fail are mundane, and one of them is a security measure that now stops honest robots and waves the dishonest ones through.
Someone opens an assistant and says: book me a haircut Thursday afternoon, somewhere near the station. Then they put the phone down and get on with their day.
Something goes off and tries to do it. It finds three salons. It gets to your booking page.
And then it stops.
This is now measurable, and the number is bad
Researchers built a test out of 153 ordinary “go and do something” jobs — book an appointment, submit an application, order the shopping — and ran them against 144 real, live websites. Not mock-ups. Actual businesses.
The best agent tested completed 33.3% of them.
The others were worse. One managed 24%. One managed 6.5%. One finished seven tasks in a thousand.
So the headline is simple: faced with a real website and a real errand, the best of these things fails two times out of three. A separate benchmark across 1,500 interactive workflows put completion under 38%. The agents are good at finding you. They are bad at doing business with you.
This is a different problem from the one everybody is writing about. Being read by AI — summarised, quoted, cited — is largely solved. Being used by one is not. Your website can be perfectly legible and still be a dead end.
What actually stops them
The failures are not exotic. The researchers list them, and they are boring in a way that should be encouraging:
- Pop-ups and overlays that appear over the thing being clicked
- Booking and payment steps that only work once JavaScript has loaded
- Multi-step flows that time out halfway
- Confirmation pages so slow the agent submits the form again, and again
- Logins standing in front of information that did not need protecting
- Anti-bot challenges
Not one of those is a hard problem. They are accumulated clutter. Every one of them also annoys human beings — the agent is just less patient and more honest about giving up.
The bit that should genuinely annoy you
Let us talk about that last one, because it has quietly inverted.
A CAPTCHA exists to keep bad automated traffic out. Here is how that is going.
When researchers pointed three leading AI systems at common image challenges, the best solved 60%, the next 56%, and the third 28%. On the harder tile-based variants they scored around zero. So the honest assistant — the one your actual customer dispatched to book an actual haircut — hits the challenge and stops.
Meanwhile there is an entire commercial industry that solves these on demand. Benchmarked in April, the leading services clear the common challenge types at 96% to 99%. The newer behaviour-based ones hold up considerably better, at around 40% — but the older, most widely deployed kinds are, for practical purposes, solved.
And the cost: defeating one of the common challenges runs about 80p per thousand. Running it on your own site costs more than that per thousand. You are paying a premium for a lock that costs the burglar less to pick than it costs you to fit.
Put plainly: your CAPTCHA now turns away your customer’s assistant and sells the fraudster a cheap day pass.
There is a postscript. Earlier this year the two most widely used challenge services went down at the same time, for hours. Every site depending on either was sealed shut — not to robots, to people. Nobody could submit a form or complete a purchase. A lot of small businesses discovered they had outsourced their own front door and never noticed.
What not to do
Here is where most advice goes wrong, so this part matters.
The current noise says to rebuild your website for agents — structured feeds, special endpoints, an “agent-ready” retainer. For a hairdresser, a plumber or a corner café, that is a waste of money.
Two reasons. First, the failures above are things you remove, not things you build; this is a tidying job, not a project. Second, the whole situation is transitional — there is a standards effort under way to let legitimate agents prove who they are, so sites can verify them rather than guess. The sensible move is to stop breaking the basics and wait for the rest.
If someone quotes you four figures to make your site agent-ready, they are selling you the solution to a problem you could fix in an afternoon by deleting things.
The fair question
devkoi builds plain pages: real links, real forms, no booking portal, no login, nothing hiding behind a widget. That shape happens to be the one agents do not trip over — not through any cleverness about agents, but because there is less there to trip on.
Worth being straight about the limit, though. devkoi does not build booking systems. If your bookings run through an outside tool — a calendar widget, a table-reservation system, a payment portal — then that is where the agent will fail, and no amount of tidying the pages around it will change that. Check the tool itself.
What to do this week
1. Watch it fail. This takes ten minutes and it is the whole article. Open any AI assistant and ask it to do the thing your customers most often do — book, order, enquire, get a quote — on your own website. Watch where it stops. You will learn more from that than from everything above.
2. Make sure your phone number and email are plain text on every page. This is the universal fallback. When an agent cannot complete a booking, a readable phone number is the difference between your customer being handed a number and your customer being handed a competitor.
“Put our phone number and email in the footer of every page, as text.”
3. Check your form works with JavaScript turned off. If it does not, it is not just agents failing — it is anyone on a bad connection or an old phone.
“Does our contact form still submit if JavaScript doesn’t load?”
4. Take the CAPTCHA off anything low-risk. A contact form does not need one. If you are getting spam, a hidden honeypot field catches most of it and is invisible to everyone — human or otherwise. Keep real protection where real money moves; take it off the front door.
5. Put the important thing one plain link from the homepage. Not inside a menu that only opens on hover, not three steps in. Prices, hours, booking, contact.
“Add direct links to booking, prices and opening hours straight from the homepage.”
6. Stop hiding facts behind a login. If it is not private, it should not need an account. Accounts are a wall for agents and an irritation for humans.
7. Then stop. Do the six things above and ignore the rest of the noise for six months. This is a tidying job, not a rebuild.
There is something almost funny about where this landed. For twenty years the web got heavier — overlays, widgets, consent walls, challenges, portals, one more thing between a person and the answer.
Now a wave of software has arrived that simply will not put up with any of it, and it is being dispatched by your customers.
The businesses it gets along with are the ones that never had the budget to make their website complicated. For once, that is the good position to be in.