The classifieds marketplace is like a hub airport. The AI agents are the equivalent of a low cost carrier like Ryanair opening up point to point connections. And unlike legacy airlines, the marketplace has no long-haul business to retreat into.
For thirty years the classifieds business has worked like a flag carrier and its hub and spoke system. A buyer and a seller cannot find each other on their own, so both are routed through one expensive centre. The portal owns the connection and charges the agent, the dealer, the private seller for the privilege of being where everyone changes planes. The model held because there was no way to fly direct. Then the low-cost carriers like Southwest, Ryanair, AirAsia, and many more showed up, flew city pair to city pair, skipped the hub, and the premium for the connection collapsed. AI agents are that direct route for the marketplace.
Applying this analogy to marketplaces three things follow:
First, the marketplace is structurally a hub, and the margin gives it away. For example here in Switzerland, the Swiss Marketplace Group reported CHF 332 million in revenue for 2025 at a 54.3 percent adjusted EBITDA margin, with guidance toward the low-to-mid sixties. Real estate alone runs near a 60 percent segment margin, automotive near 66. A business does not earn a 60 percent margin on the cost of running servers. It earns it on the cost of changing planes. That margin exists because the buyer had no way to reach the seller without passing through the centre.
Second, the agent is the direct flight, and it already flies. It can read every listing across every portal, contact the sellers, compare, and come back with three options while the human is still making coffee. This is not a 2030 thought experiment. OpenAI shipped Instant Checkout in September 2025. Perplexity launched buying inside the chat with PayPal in November. Google announced its own commerce protocol in January 2026. eMarketer expects AI platforms to drive roughly 21 billion dollars of US retail spending in 2026, close to four times the year before. Once the matching moves to the agent, the reason to route through the centre goes with it.
Third, and this is where the analogy turns against the marketplace, the flag carriers survived the low-cost attack because they had a business the budget airlines could not take. Long-haul. Frankfurt to Singapore needs a wide-body, a global network, slots, and capital. Ryanair was never going to fly it. That protected territory kept Lufthansa alive while its short-haul margins were cut to the bone. The classifieds platform has no long-haul. Every route it flies is short, point-to-point matching between a local buyer and a local seller, the one thing the agent does best. No intercontinental segment to retreat into, no protected business the agent cannot reach. The whole network is exposed.
The clearest signal comes from the incumbents. SMG will put an ImmoScout24 app inside ChatGPT in the second half of 2026 and is building agentic features for its agents and dealers. The most valuable classifieds operator in Switzerland is voluntarily placing a door to its own inventory inside someone else’s agent. Amazon went the other way and sued Perplexity to keep external agents off its marketplace. Opening a gate at the low-cost terminal, or building a wall around the hub, are different bets. Both price the agent as a threat to the fee, not a feature.
None of this kills the marketplace. Flag carriers still fly and Frankfurt is still busy. What goes is the captive premium for the connection. The discovery toll at the top of the funnel, the lead, the listing slot, the advertising the portal sold because it owned attention, is the fee an agent routes around first. What is left is thinner and harder to defend. The trust, the verified inventory, the closing of a deal a human still wants a human for.
The hub did not lose its premium because the low-cost carriers were clever. It lost it because the connection stopped being scarce. AI just made the connection cheap, allowing for a disruption of any such marketplace.
