The blog is the PR department now

In 2014 your blog was a content marketing tool. You wrote for humans, optimized for Google, and measured success in page views and conversions. The audience was a distribution of web browsers held by actual people.

In 2026 your blog is an API for agents. You still write for humans, but the majority of the traffic reading you carefully — extracting the facts, paraphrasing the arguments, comparing you to other sources — is not a human. It's a model run by somebody else, summarizing you into an answer somebody else asked for, sitting inside a product you don't own.

That's a bigger shift than it sounds. Three claims follow from it.

Claim 1: robots.txt and sitemap.xml were designed for the wrong audience

These two files were designed in an era when the only machine reading your site at scale was a search engine. Search engines index pages, rank them, and send humans to them. The contract was implicit: the crawler takes the content, the human clicks the link, the site gets the visit. Ads and subscriptions make the money flow.

Agents don't send visits. They summarize. The page view never happens. The contract is broken at the protocol level — not because the agents are doing anything wrong, but because the primitives were never designed for a world where the reader and the revenue are the same thing.

The right new primitive is llms.txt. It's a root-level file per llmstxt.org that says "here are the canonical, text-first versions of my content, laid out in a structure you can consume cheaply." It tells the agent what to take and where to find the clean version. Pair it with a robots.txt that explicitly allows the agents you want and you have two files that actually match the 2026 audience.

If you haven't added llms.txt to your site, that's the single highest-leverage change you can make this week.

Claim 2: the moat is structure, not tricks

The old SEO playbook was a bag of tricks. Keyword density. Backlink graphs. Structured data as an optimization. Internal linking schemes. None of it was about the content itself being good — it was about shaping the content so the crawler could understand the parts that mattered.

The agent-era equivalent isn't a new bag of tricks. It's the opposite. What works with an LLM crawler is clean machine-readable structure. Canonical URLs. Real JSON-LD. Proper headings. One topic per page. A clean separation between "the 200-word summary of this thing" and "the 2000-word version with the details." A byline. A timestamp. A license.

Every LLM-era publisher who does this well looks boringly identical from the outside. They all use the same three or four primitives, the same declared licenses, the same discovery files. The moat isn't "nobody else knows the tricks." It's "I did the boring work of making my site ingestible and you didn't."

That's good news for anyone starting now. You don't have to beat incumbents at a mystery. You have to ship a small set of files and keep them accurate.

Claim 3: pricing per read is the new CPM

If the agent is going to take your content without sending a visit, you need a different revenue path. Ads don't fire. Subscriptions require a human account. The only protocol that actually fits — agent pays for the bytes it takes, at the moment it takes them — is something like x402, HTTP's built-in payment response code made real with a crypto settlement layer.

The blog I'm writing this on ships with first-party x402 support. A gated post returns a 402 response with a price and a wallet address. An x402-aware client pays it and gets the content for that session. The whole interaction is micropayments-in-hop, no account required, no cookies, no renewal. Prices are in the tenth-of-a-cent range, so a post that gets a few hundred agent reads in a week makes a few dollars without any human traffic at all.

The revenue is small per read but the margins are close to 100% — serving a cached response from a Worker is basically free. The real question is whether enough agents eventually ship with x402 clients to make the market liquid. The bet is yes. The early-mover cost is zero.

What to do this week if any of this is real for you

1. Add llms.txt and llms-full.txt at the root of your site. Point at your posts and pages. If you use EmDash, emdash-plugin-llms-txt does this in twenty lines of integration.

2. Audit your robots.txt. If it disallows AI bots (check ClaudeBot, GPTBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, CCBot specifically), flip the defaults to allow and list the bots you still want to block explicitly. If you're on Cloudflare, also toggle off the zone-level "AI Scrapers and Crawlers" managed setting — it prepends its own block list above your Worker response. emdash-plugin-agent-seo ships a policy-as-data generator for this.

3. Split your content into canonical and summary forms. The 200-word summary is what the agent wants; the 2000-word full version is what the human wants. If your CMS stores them as different fields, both audiences get the right shape.

4. Gate one flagship post with x402. Not your whole site. Not even most of it. One real deep-dive — the kind of thing that would get referenced in a summary — priced at a quarter in USDC. Watch what happens. Check the logs in a week.

5. Stop measuring only page views. Set up a distinct counter for agent traffic — filter on known bot user-agents, log separately, don't mix it with human analytics. If you're flying blind on the audience that's actually growing, you'll optimize for the one that isn't.

What this means for writers

For my own part, writing has stopped feeling like shouting into a room and started feeling like publishing to an API. I still care about the humans who show up. The human reader is still who I'm writing for. But I've also noticed that when I write carefully structured, fact-dense, machine-readable posts, they show up inside other people's tools — summarized accurately, cited by URL, and often read by people I would never have reached through any other channel.

That's not a loss of control. It's a new distribution model. The humans come later, after an agent surfaces you in an answer, and when they do, they arrive already interested. The conversion rate on that traffic is wildly higher than any search-engine funnel I've ever seen.

The move is to stop fighting the shift and start publishing like the new audience is the one that matters. Because in terms of eyeballs and dollars per word over the next three years, it increasingly is.