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NP Nilay Patel Nilay Patel Editor-in-chief of The Verge, which he co-founded in 2011, covering consumer technology, platforms and the policy around them.

“The web is about to go through the weirdest period of all time because it is the fallback user interface for every agent, whether or not those agents work or are good. It's not MCP or APIs. It's like, we're going to click around the website for you. Half of the companies are just blocking agents. … You, with your dumb human eyes, are going to have to look at something on your phone while we still have phones. And it's one of four apps. And every company wants to be one of those four apps.”

The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“The web is about to go through the weirdest period of all time because it is the fallback user interface for every agent, whether or not those agents work or are good. It's not MCP or APIs. It's like, we're going to click around the website for you. Half of the companies are just blocking agents. … You, with your dumb human eyes, are going to have to look at something on your phone while we still have phones. And it's one of four apps. And every company wants to be one of those four apps.” — Nilay Patel, The Vergecast

Context

The hosts had just agreed that if Reddit dies there is nothing left to Google. Patel then describes what the web becomes when AI agents use websites on people's behalf.

Listen to the episode → More from Nilay Patel → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

The Vergecast Around 52:45 into the episode
Nilay Patel

what are you going to search for if Reddit is dead?

David Pierce

That's a really good question. Nothing.

Nilay Patel

Just like think one more turn. Yeah. We'll see. The web is about to go through the weirdest period of all time now because it is the fallback user interface for every agent, whether or not those agents work or are good, but it's the fallback user interface for every agent. Right. It's not MCP or APIs. It's like, we're going to click around the website for you. Half of the companies are just like blocking agents. They're blocking Muse now to extract some business terms. And along the way, it's like, what are you going to look at? Like you, with your dumb human eyes, are going to have to look at something on your phone while we still have phones. And it's like one of four apps. And every company wants to be one of those four apps.

David Pierce

Yeah. And if you are one of those four apps, boy, are you trying to just shrink the world around you as much as you possibly can? I hate it. It's a dismal future. Yeah, it's really bleak. On the other hand,

Nilay Patel

Muse has a butt. Huh? He's real cute.

David Pierce

On the other hand, Muse can get it. That's how we should just start ending all of our podcasts when. All right, we should take a break. We're going to come back. It's me laying around time. We'll be right

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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