Web Verbs: Typed Abstractions for Reliable Task Composition on the Agentic Web
Linxi Jiang, Rui Xi, Zhijie Liu, Shuo Chen, Zhiqiang Lin, Suman Nath

TL;DR
This paper introduces Web Verbs, a typed, semantic abstraction layer for web actions that enhances the reliability, efficiency, and verifiability of goal-directed web agents by unifying API and browser-based interactions.
Contribution
It proposes Web Verbs as a standardized, semantic set of web actions that enable more reliable, efficient, and verifiable web automation for agents, bridging API and browser paradigms.
Findings
Web Verbs improve agent reliability and robustness.
The approach reduces complex workflows into concise function calls.
Case studies demonstrate enhanced execution compared to existing agents.
Abstract
The Web is evolving from a medium that humans browse to an environment where software agents act on behalf of users. Advances in large language models (LLMs) make natural language a practical interface for goal-directed tasks, yet most current web agents operate on low-level primitives such as clicks and keystrokes. These operations are brittle, inefficient, and difficult to verify. Complementing content-oriented efforts such as NLWeb's semantic layer for retrieval, we argue that the agentic web also requires a semantic layer for web actions. We propose \textbf{Web Verbs}, a web-scale set of typed, semantically documented functions that expose site capabilities through a uniform interface, whether implemented through APIs or robust client-side workflows. These verbs serve as stable and composable units that agents can discover, select, and synthesize into concise programs. This…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMulti-Agent Systems and Negotiation · Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques · Business Process Modeling and Analysis
