Notes from the work · Section
How AI agents find, read and book with local businesses.
In six weeks this fall, Meta launched an agent that buys things, Amazon blocked it, and agent orders more than quadrupled. Part 1 of Beyond the Four Walls: what changes when the customer stops walking in and starts sending software.
An AI assistant sent to book a call with us would have been turned away at the door. Here is what was wrong, what we changed in one afternoon, and the one point we chose not to chase.
Banks, card networks and Cloudflare spent the last year building ways for an AI agent to prove who it is. Most local business websites are still checking everyone at the door the old way. Part 9 of Beyond the Four Walls.
Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity and Opera have all put an agent inside the browser that can click, type and fill in forms. OpenAI built one and shut it down. Part 8 of Beyond the Four Walls: what that means for the form on your website.
Google can already call a salon for prices, book through three beauty and wellness platforms, and take payment for a hotel inside a chat. Part 7 of Beyond the Four Walls: why your Business Profile now matters more than your homepage.
Amazon built its own shopping agent, sent it to buy on other brands' sites, and fought to keep outside agents off its own. Part 6 of Beyond the Four Walls: what that playbook teaches a gym, studio or spa.
Meta is automating both ends of local marketing: machines that buy the ads and machines that answer the people who click them. Part 5 of Beyond the Four Walls: what that means for a gym, a studio or a med spa.
The web reserved a "Payment Required" code in 1997 and never used it. Now Coinbase, Cloudflare, Stripe and Visa are building rails for software that pays a few cents at a time. Part 4 of Beyond the Four Walls.
In one year Stripe co-wrote a shopping protocol with OpenAI, gave agents their own wallet, and quietly made checkout pages for 7.8 million businesses readable by software. Part 3 of Beyond the Four Walls: what that means for the studio or spa that takes payments online.
robots.txt, structured data, llms.txt, MCP and WebMCP, in plain English, and which ones a gym, studio or spa should fix first. Part 2 of Beyond the Four Walls.
Book a walkthrough with David Steel. Bring last month's lead count and one location you are worried about.
