An interactive story · also readable as text
The Agent's Journey
What actually happens when someone asks an AI assistant to find them a home in Europe. If JavaScript is enabled, this page plays as a small click-through game — which is fitting, because the story is about what happens to agents that can't run JavaScript.
1 · The ask
Saturday morning. A buyer picks up their phone and asks their AI assistant: “Find me a two-bedroom in Lisbon. Under €400,000, near a metro stop.” The assistant says: on it.
2 · The journey
The assistant sends an agent out onto the open web. Somewhere out there: tens of thousands of live listings.
3 · Portal one — robots.txt
The first portal refuses at the front door. One line in a file called robots.txt — Disallow: / — and a polite agent has to walk away. Turned away.
4 · Portal two — the bot-wall
The second portal runs an enterprise bot-wall. “403 — verify you are human.” The agent isn't, so that's the end of it. About half of the European portals Placy audited block agents live at the door — with the listings sitting right behind the wall. Blocked.
5 · Portal three — the blank page
The third portal lets the agent in — and serves an empty page. The listings only exist after JavaScript runs in a browser — and this agent has no browser. It reads: nothing. Empty page.
6 · Portal four — finally, readable
The fourth portal is plain, honest HTML. At last the agent reads real listings — 42 of them, across the handful of open portals like this one. In Europe, roughly one portal in eight is readable. Readable.
7 · The tally
By the end of the crawl the pattern is clear: 87% of the European portals Placy audited are invisible or blocked to an AI agent. The agent saw a slice of the market — the market leaders kept the lights off, and the agencies behind those walls never even saw the buyer.
8 · The report
The agent comes back and does the honest thing. “I found 42 listings and three possible matches. But only about one portal in eight let me read its listings — the biggest ones wouldn't. Your best option may be a home I couldn't see.”
9 · The buyer
“So… you searched an eighth of the market. That's not an answer.” Task incomplete. Honest or not, an answer that misses seven-eighths of the market feels wrong. And one bad answer is all it takes: 79% of people say they'd lose confidence in AI after a single mistake about housing.
10 · The other door
None of this is the agent's fault. The listings were real, the buyer was real — the doors were closed. Placy opens one door for all of them: listings licensed directly from the agencies that hold them and served to every AI assistant through one open connection — the Placy rail. The agent asks once; the whole market answers; the qualified lead goes back to the agency. Task complete.