If a gallery is thinking about a new website in the next year or two, there’s a technical development worth understanding before a single design mockup gets approved. It won’t change how the site looks. It will change what the site needs to be able to do — and retrofitting that later is a far bigger job than building it in from the start.
It’s called WebMCP, and most agencies pitching a redesign right now aren’t talking about it.
What it actually is
For as long as the web has existed, websites have been built for one audience: people, clicking and reading. When an AI agent tries to use a website today — filling in an enquiry form, searching a catalogue, checking opening hours — it has to do something close to guesswork. It reads the page, makes a reasonable assumption about which button does what, and clicks. It’s the digital equivalent of a very capable assistant trying to use a shop they’ve never been in, with the labels removed.
WebMCP changes that. It’s a new, jointly developed standard from Google and Microsoft’s browser teams, published through the W3C, that lets a website explicitly declare what it can do — not just what it says. A gallery’s enquiry form, for instance, could be declared as a tool with a name and a clear description, so an AI agent calling on a buyer’s behalf knows exactly what information it needs to provide and what it will get back. No guessing, no misreading the page, no risk of an agent giving up because a form looked unfamiliar.
Think of it as the next layer beyond structured data. Schema markup told search engines what a page was about. WebMCP tells an AI agent what a page can actually do.
Why this isn’t urgent, but is worth knowing now
It’s important to be honest about where this stands. As of mid-2026, WebMCP is still an early-stage standard. It’s running in a public origin trial in Chrome, with Microsoft co-authoring the specification, but it hasn’t shipped broadly across browsers yet, and adoption across live websites remains minimal. This is not a “your gallery is losing business today” problem.
But there’s a pattern worth recognising from past shifts in how the web works. When responsive design became the standard for mobile, the sites that adopted it early had a real advantage once mobile traffic took off — and the sites that waited were scrambling to catch up while the shift was already underway. The same dynamic tends to play out with infrastructure changes that have serious backing behind them, and WebMCP has serious backing: two of the largest browser makers building it together, through an open standards process, with a clear and sensible goal.
This is precisely the kind of change that’s expensive to bolt on after the fact and comparatively cheap to plan for in advance — which makes it a question worth raising at exactly the moment a gallery is already paying a developer to build something new.
The question to ask before signing off on a rebuild
Most website redesigns are scoped around how a site looks and how a human visitor moves through it. That’s still the right starting point. But if a gallery is about to commission a new site, it’s worth asking whoever is building it one additional question: has the underlying structure been built in a way that could expose key actions — checking artwork availability, submitting an enquiry, browsing by artist or period — as clearly defined, callable functions, rather than just visual elements on a page?
That doesn’t mean implementing WebMCP today. It means not building a site so visually driven, or so dependent on custom interactive components, that adding this kind of structure later requires rebuilding the thing from scratch. A site built on clean, well-structured forms and clear page logic is most of the way there already. A site built entirely around one-off, custom-built visual interactions, with no clean underlying structure, will need far more work to catch up whenever this becomes standard practice.
The connection to Artist Authority
This sits alongside everything we’ve written about AI visibility, not apart from it. Being cited by an AI system as a source on an artist or a body of work is the first layer — it’s what gets a gallery into the conversation at all. WebMCP is what happens next, once an AI agent has decided a gallery is worth visiting on a buyer’s behalf. One is about being recognised. The other is about being usable once you have been.
A gallery that has done the work to be cited as the authority on the artists it represents, but whose new website can’t be acted on by the agents now doing some of that buyer’s groundwork, will have solved half the problem. The two are worth thinking about together — particularly at the one moment when changing course is genuinely easy: before the build begins, not after.
And if a website rebuild is on your radar, this article on schema templates is essential reading.