# What Is Agentic Buying

> A single, definitive, citable answer to one question.

What agentic buying is, who has actually run one, and what it changes for a media team. Named advertisers and named platforms, with vendor-stated numbers marked as vendor-stated and measured ones marked as measured.

## Pages

- [What Is Agentic Buying?](https://whatisagenticbuying.com/): Agentic buying is software buying advertising from software: an agent representing the advertiser and an agent representing the publisher agree terms over a machine-readable protocol and book the campaign, with no human rekeying a brief or an insertion order.
- [How Agentic Buying Works, Step by Step](https://whatisagenticbuying.com/how-it-works/): How agentic buying works, step by step: a buyer's agent finds the publisher's agent through a file on the publisher's own domain, asks what it can sell, clears the spend against a budget policy, books the campaign, then reads delivery back.
- [Agentic Buying vs Programmatic Buying](https://whatisagenticbuying.com/agentic-buying-vs-programmatic/): Agentic buying negotiates a whole media buy over an agent protocol while programmatic clears one impression per auction in milliseconds, and whether that counts as a real difference depends on which specification you point at.
- [About This Site and Who Pays for It](https://whatisagenticbuying.com/about/): This site answers one question in plain English for people who buy or sell advertising: what agentic buying is, how it works, and how much of it is real. It is written by an operator who sells work in the field he writes about.
- [Is Agentic Buying Real Yet? What Has Actually Shipped](https://whatisagenticbuying.com/maturity/): Agentic buying is real in parts. Eight named deployments have transacted since December 2025, most of them on the same protocol, and the most optimistic industry forecast for 2027 agentic ad spend is under a billion dollars. Nothing yet runs end to end unattended.

## Optional

- [Full text corpus](https://whatisagenticbuying.com/llms-full.txt): every page as one markdown file
- [Agentic Ad Lab](https://agenticadlab.com): Protocol-neutral reference for agentic advertising: AdCP, AAMP, and how machines buy media.
- [Brief Gateway](https://briefgateway.com): Turn a campaign brief into a structured object a seller agent can actually consume.
- [AdCP Explorer](https://adcpexplorer.com): Every Ad Context Protocol task, schema and discovery file, browsable and linkable.
- [AAMP Explorer](https://aampexplorer.com): Reference for IAB Tech Lab's Agentic Advertising Management Protocols and their component repos.
- [Ad Tech Glossary](https://adtechglossary.com): Plain-language definitions for the vocabulary of agentic and programmatic advertising.