Yeah, I also find the analogy about "agent on behalf of the user interacting with a website" weak, because it is not about "an agent", it is a 3rd party service that actually takes content from a website, processes it and serves it to the user (even with their own ads?). It is more akin to, let's say, a scammy website that copies content from other legit websites and serves their own ads, than software running on the user's computer.

There are legitimate reasons to do that, of course. Maybe I am trying to find info about some niche topic or how to do X, I ask an llm, the llm goes through some search results, a lot of which is search engine optimised crap, finds the relevant info and answers my question.

But if I wrote articles in a news site, I am supported by ads or subscriptions and see my visits plummel because people, who would usually google about topic X and then visit my website that I wrote about X, were now reading the google summary that appeared when googling about topic X, based on my article, maybe I would have less motivation to continue writing.

The only end result possible in such a scenario is that everything commercial of some quality being heavily paywalled, some tiny amount of free and open small web, and a huge amount of AI generated slop, because the value of an article in the open internet is now so low that only AI can produce it (economically, time-wise) efficiently enough.