a16z coins the B2A economy: agents now drive majority of web traffic and 8x AI traffic growth for Shopify
venturetwins · x · 2026-11-12
a16z partners Olivia Moore and Justine Moore open a series on the "B2A economy," arguing agents are now the internet's primary users: they make up most web traffic, write over half of new online articles, and generate most production code.
Key points:
- Like Web and Mobile before it, agents are the next distribution platform — moving from answering questions to completing purchases on users' behalf.
- Data cited: Shopify saw AI-driven store traffic grow 8x YoY and AI-search orders 13x, with better retention and conversion; 11.4% of US shopper journeys now hit AI before checkout (Similarweb); Supabase says 60%+ of new databases come from AI tools, Neon 80% from agents, Stripe agents near 40% of doc traffic and 70% of CLI requests, Vcel agent-triggered deployments up 28x in a year.
- Four beneficiary groups: agents themselves, newly enabled products, businesses optimizing for agentic traffic, and agent infra.
- Anecdote: the authors asked Codex for help making a TV ad and it upsold them a Descript subscription.
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