Episode One - AI Slop, and the challenges of not booking a guest
The next visitor to your website may well be a machine. AI assistants have started browsing, comparing and even buying on our behalf, and most of us are nodding along in meetings hoping nobody asks us to explain it. This week A-Why?, Kier Humphreys catches you up on two weeks of AI news, then decodes the jargon behind all that nodding: agentic traffic, what it actually is, and what it means for anyone who runs a website. This episode covers: - Slop, slop, slop. Why everything you scroll past suddenly feels machine-made, and whether the anger is justified. - When Google answers, nobody clicks. Pew tracked 900 US adults: 15% of searches end in a click through to a website when there is no AI summary, 8% when there is one, and just 1% of people click the links inside the summary itself. - Grok 4.5 is here, GPT-5.6 is out, and there is already GPT-6 talk within weeks. The model war is accelerating, and the case for staying model-agnostic keeps getting stronger. - 46% of European B2B marketers say AI has already replaced staff at their organisation. 66% say it never will. Both findings come from the same Forrester research. - 4.5 million US retail reviews on Trustpilot point the same way: customers are happy for AI to help them find things, and want a person the moment something goes wrong. - Analytic Partners' Preeti Croke on why the real test for brands is whether they can use the data they already hold. Then it's The Thing Everyone's Pretending To Understand: agentic traffic. Imagine sending a little robot to the store to check the stock, compare the prices, read the labels and bring back the best option. AI agents now do exactly that across the web: browsing, reading, comparing and even completing the purchase on a human's behalf. It is a small share of traffic today, and it is growing, which is awkward for every dashboard built on visits and sessions. A visit could be a customer, a search engine or an LLM training run, and the numbers alone will not tell you which. By the end of this segment, you will be the one explaining it in the meeting. And because the news cycle needs it, Reasons To Be Cheerful: Stripe's data shows three times more solo businesses founded in 2025 reached $1m in their first year than those founded in 2019. It has never been easier for a tiny team to punch above its weight.
