New technologies constantly appear and disappear. Early in my career, I often chased the latest shiny thing to stay on the cutting edge, but it only took a few years to realize I was burning countless hours of my own time — and my clients’ time — on tools and tactics that quickly became irrelevant. Google Authorship, anyone? I eventually learned that if you wait for broader — yet still relatively early — adoption, study the first movers’ missteps, and then move fast, you can avoid a lot of waste and deliver far more value to yourself and the people you serve. That insight has paid off again and again.
But every so often, there are inflection points where the earliest adopters don’t just win in the current environment — they help define and lead the next one. Think of the first folks who read the PageRank paper and thought, “I should start building links.” WebMCP feels like one of those inflection points, only on a much larger scale. It’s not merely a shift in how search operates or how generative engines surface content. We’re entering a phase where the very arena of discoverability is changing — and so is the entity doing the discovering.
Coming soon: Non-human engagement
SEOs have long argued over whether we should optimize for search engines or for humans (unsurprisingly, the answer has been “both”), but that framework is about to be upended. What happens when the primary agent of discovery is no longer a person, but an LLM or an agentic system? That transition has already begun.…