The industry is writing the rules for who gets paid when an agent buys

This looks like an advertising story, but it isn't. It's a measurement story, and measurement decides budget. If a meaningful share of your customers now arrive after an assistant did the comparing for them, your analytics is filing those people under "direct". Essentially this means the channel that is actually growing is the one showing zero attributable revenue. Channels with zero attributable revenue get defunded. You will cut the thing that's working because your dashboard can't see it. Two moves before November, neither of which needs a vendor. Ask new customers in the sign-up flow how they found you. The self-reported attribution is crude, but it is the only signal that survives an assistant. Then count agent traffic in your server logs separately from human traffic, so you at least know the size of the thing you can't measure. The reason to do that now rather than wait: Michael Bishop of OpenAds points out the platforms may end up marking their own homework here, the way Facebook built and controlled its own measurement integrations.