Our Web Access Manifesto: Information wants to be free

Historically, humans had to navigate the web manually through a browser. This restricts the amount of information they can collect and process at once.

AI agents are changing the interface through which humans use the web. They can fetch and synthesize web data orders of magnitude faster than humans. We expect this trend to continue to accelerate - Cloudflare reported that bot traffic has already exceeded human web traffic.

However, the web was not built for agents.

Harmless agents are denied access on many websites that intend to block malicious bots. For example, ask Claude to do a pricing comparison of Nike shoe products. A human would see dozens of shoes but an agent gets blocked. Ask ChatGPT the prices of Manhattan apartments on Zillow. A human would see hundreds of apartments but an agent gets blocked.

The only bot allowed is Google. And Google denies agent access to its search results to preserve ad dollars.

Agents need a reliable web access layer. They need safe passage to the internet.

For the last 2 years, we've helped the largest hedge funds solve this problem for their web research tasks. As a result, we've built the leading technology in this market. See our Web Data Frontier Benchmark for proof.

And now we're opening up these capabilities to everyone.

The promise of the web was to make information accessible. We're building String to fulfill this promise in the new agentic world.

Cheers,
String team