AI agents are the new buyers. How can you market to them?

AI with ALLIE

The professional’s guide to quick AI bites for your personal life, work life, and beyond.

In today’s newsletter, I’m unpacking why your next major buyers won’t be people at all. They’ll be AI agents, and your brand might already be invisible to them. We’ll dig into why traditional marketing strategies are breaking down in the age of autonomous AI shoppers, what “AI optimization” (AIO) really means, and the practical steps you can take right now to make sure your business stays visible and competitive as the new digital gatekeepers take over more digital tasks.

I was leaving a coffee meeting with a CMO two weeks ago, talking about the future of marketing and the hellstorm I’m predicting in the near-term for brands. As I was leaving, she sort of grabbed my arm and asked, "But…how do I even know if AI agents can see my website?"

Great question. And one that most marketers haven't even thought to ask yet.

Marketers have spent the past decade obsessing over Google rankings and social algorithms, and yes, those things have been a seismic shift in how brands tell their story, find customers, and build loyalty.

But you’re not just marketing to humans anymore.

Read that one more time…

For the entirety of your lifetime, you have only seen people sell to humans (B2C) or to businesses run by humans (B2B).

That era of simplicity is ending.

AI platforms and AI agents—the digital assistants that browse and actually do things powered by models like GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.5 Pro—are increasingly becoming the gatekeepers between your business and potential customers.

As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, AI agents are helping consumers all over the world find and interact with brands in new ways. We covered everything from AI as a comparison shopper to a customer advocate for a discount to a decision-making support system.

AI is the new front door to your business for millions of consumers. This is especially true when I talk to Gen Z, holy moly.

Get this…According to Higher Visibility, 82% of Gen Z have used AI search tools at least occasionally, compared to about 60-65% of Millennials and Gen x, and 45% of Boomers. Their search patterns are really changing all over the place, shares SOCI in Forbes - 67% of Gen Z uses Instagram as one of their search engines, compared to 62% of TikTok (standard Google is at 61%, so this is a big shift).

Plus, a recent Verge study of 2000 adults shared that 52% of folks surveyed have started to prefer the AI tools over Gogle.

When someone asks ChatGPT "What's the best CRM for small businesses?" or tells Claude to "Find me lightweight hiking boots under $150," it’s these AI systems that are making the first cut on which brands even get considered.

And I’m guessing you have no idea if you’re in the running. Heck, you might be practically invisible to them.

The Invisible Brand Crisis

Traditional marketing and design focuses on human eyeballs. What looks good to a human? How can we get Billy to click on the higher priced cruise? How can we get Steve to upgrade his team to the higher tier of this SaaS product? How do we make Bethany’s checkout process faster? How can we convince Patagonia and Arcteryx customers to buy our titanium, damage-proof wallet?

They’ve focused on emotional headlines, compelling descriptions, flashy animations, stunning videos, pop-up offers and email signups, image-heavy designs, and content hidden behind fancy JavaScript tricks.

But AI agents don't have eyeballs and brains and hearts.

They have parsers and models and system prompts.

When an AI agent visits your site, it needs information. It’s looking for clean, accessible, structured data it can easily digest and present back to users. It’s looking for clear, organized paragraphs that it can gobble up and synthesize back to that human user.

Some of those visual bells and whistles will be completely wasted on an AI.

And worst case, they may actively prevent AI from accessing your actual content.

These agents scrape, summarize, and synthesize the web to guide users to decisions. If your product info, docs, and CTAs aren’t structured, visible, and machine-readable, you’ll get leapfrogged by a competitor that is. I have this rumbling deep inside, and it’s not hunger because I just had a Trader Joe’s salad, that companies that establish themselves as AI-visible now will have an enormous advantage as these platforms continue their explosive growth.

The new SEO is AI optimization

AI agent optimization (or just AI optimization, or AIO for short) is, in my opinion, the next frontier for digital marketers. And we're still in the early days.

I've compiled my only little starter playbook for making your business visible to AI agents. And I feel like a broken record every time I caveat these things, but much like the series ending of Severance: no one really knows what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of opportunity, but it also means the playbook isn’t perfect. This is my educated guess based on my years of working in AI, my work with marketing professionals, and my work with AI labs. And I suppose my two seasons of watching Severance.

Every major tech company is racing to build their own AI agents, from Google Gemini to Agentforce from Salesforce to OpenAI Swarm and Manus AI. The list below aims to work across all these platforms because they (presumably) share similar fundamental architecture for processing web content.

TLDR: The Five Main Tactics of AIO

1. Make your upsells text-based and helpfulness-forward

   Popups or visual-only upsells may not register well with AI agents → use inline text for upsells that clearly explain added value to users so the agent can align it with user goals or relay findings to human user.

2. Make docs public and easy to navigate

   Click-expanding menus and nested navs are harder, or at least more annoying, for AIs to parse → use long, flat pages with clear section headers, anchor links, summaries, etc.

3. Make everything super easy to navigate

   Complicated UX can confuse humans and AI agents → use simple, clean layouts with visible content and minimal JavaScript.

4. Keep SEO best practices because AI agents still rely on basic search

   AI tools pull from top-ranking pages just like a human would → maintain strong SEO hygiene like title tags, meta descriptions, backlinks.

5. Test visibility in ChatGPT/Claude/You.com/Perplexity regularly

   You may not realize you're invisible until you ask → run prompts like "Use the internet. What’s the best X for Y?” Like “what’s the quietest breast pump for working moms?” Or “what’s the best SaaS tool for running my pool league?" or “Compare Smartlock A and B for Airbnb rentals and create a dynamic decision-making tool to help me pick.” or “Rank the top 10 competitors for IKEA by affordability and sustainability, and track if you're mentioned. If you are mentioned - what source mentioned you? If you’re not mentioned - what sources mentioned your competitors?

The 40-Point (ish) AI Agent Marketing Playbook

Here’s the longer list. I went ahead and broke these into four categories so you can more easily assign owners: Content, Structure & Design, Technical & Dev, and AI Strategy & Testing. I look forward to seeing how this space, and by extension my advice, changes in the coming months.

📄 Content Optimization

Owned by a copywriter or marketing manager.

1. Make upsells inline and text-based. Pop-ups may be ignored by bots.

2. Write short product summaries just for AI agents to read. Almost like an “AI cheat sheet.”

3. Create pages that directly answer buyer queries. AI-friendly Q&A = higher pickup.

4. Encourage user reviews to include product names, specs, and comparisons.

5. Provide AI-readable brand voice guidelines. So agents speak your tone.

6. Include transparent product disclosures, with neutrality and clarity.

7. Make your “About” page factual and comparison-ready.

8. Answer 3-5 core buying questions by default on each product page.

9. Offer condensed knowledge cards. Almost like Wikipedia snippets for AI.

10. Use bullet points and summaries in addition to longform prose.

11. Use real CTA copy like “Get the full comparison chart” instead of “Learn more.”

🏛 Structure & Design

Owned by a web designer or web developer.

12. Put docs in long-scroll pages with anchor links. Avoid JS-heavy nested menus.

13. Use HTML tables and bullets for comparisons. Structured > stylish.

14. Use semantic HTML properly. <h2>, <section>, <tbody>, and not just a mess of divs.

15. Add structured data everywhere (FAQ, Product, Review schema).

16. Add alt-text, real headings, and clean links. SEO basics have huge overlap AIO basics.

17. Avoid CAPTCHA or modal walls on critical pages.

18. Make cookie banners non-blocking. Agents can click but it’s friction. Degrade gracefully.

19. Don’t hide anything behind logins or paywalls. Offer mirrors or previews.

20. Make sure lazy-loaded or scrolled content is also accessible.

🚀 Technical & Developer Actions

Owned by a web developer.

21. Offer a clean, machine-readable product feed (XML or JSON).

22. Render everything important server-side. Avoid JS-only rendering.

23. Let AI see updates. Use “last updated” timestamps with years included.

24. Avoid putting specs in images or PDFs without HTML versions.

25. Create “For AI Agents” pages or sitemaps. Like a press kit for agents.

26. Simulate a crawl session by multiple AI agents. See what they actually ingest. Do not run them in parallel—watch each virtual browser view for each agent live.

27. Tag key pages or sections with internal AI-optimized labels.

28. Use meta directives to allow access to AI crawlers (ex: GPTBot).

29. Detect blocks in robots.txt or server config that might block AI bots.

30. Ensure no-JS fallback or graceful degradation for critical pages.

🤝 Strategy, Audits, and Testing

Owned by a marketing manager, SEO manager, or technical documentation specialist.

31. Conduct monthly AI visibility audits. Run regular prompts against key search inside of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Manus AI, etc. Create a standard benchmark for brand visibility and document performance. Add this to your existing internal SEO cadence.

32. Keep content evergreen and/or visibly updated.

33. Before launch and during QA for important pages or product launches, simulate AI agent sessions. Use multiple platforms and providers. Think about those eye tracking experiments that people ran to test the layouts of their websites.

34. Build plugins/integrations for ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. as needed.

35. Publish API endpoints or at least public product documentation or product manuals for agents to access (ex: if I need to fix my vacuum, I want ChatGPT to be able to find the manual specific to my make and model, and then use it as live context to help me fix it).

36. Run key searches on multi-intent prompts ("best AND cheapest...") to find most popular for your offering (ex: lipstick is “colorful and smooth”, shovels are “lightest and strongest”) in one page. Use SEO tools to find those combo searches, historical data you have as a brand, or scour subreddits for examples.

37. Design your marketing (including on-page or on-site bots, those bottom-right corner ones) with voice agents, agents-as-buyers, and future agents in mind. Easier said than done, but very few companies are even acknowledging this evolution in their internal meetings. Pretending it does not exist does not make it go away.

AI-first marketing is not just using AI while you do your marketing job—like writing captions or partnership announcements with AI. It’s considering AI throughout your whole ownership sphere—which includes factoring in how your customers are using AI, which I covered in depth in this previous post I shared above.

We will know more as general AI agents come online and as more and more non-technical users start leaning into them. For now, they’re a bit expensive, a bit clunky, and a bit unreliable. But my team and I have already started updating our web and social practices because of this.

What This Means For You

“But Allie, you just said this is all a guess. Why would I do any of this if it’s all a guess?” Great question, total stranger reading this!

Here are some of those bigger takeaways I want you talking to your bosses and directs about, even with the guesses on the details in the 40ish list.

1. AI literacy just got more important for marketing. Train your teams, making sure your marketing team in particular (or really, any field-facing group) understands how AI agents work and process information. Watch my complete intro to AI agents webinar covering this. This baseline education plus their existing subject matter expertise will naturally lead to better practices.

2. Test the hell out of these tools. I like to think of Spiderman’s spidey sense in that the more exposure you have to a space and the more you hone your craft, the tighter your instincts will be. We’re not shooting spider webs, but I want experimentation to be a big pillar for your spidey sense building in the AI agent space. Try out Operator, Proxy, Manus, or at least a Deep Research tool (ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and Perplexity all have it).

3. Auditing just got broader. As I mentioned, test your AI visibility today. Literally right now. Go ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity about your product category and see if your brand appears. This baseline measurement is critical. Is your website AI-friendly? Run a quick test: ask three different AI assistants if they'd recommend your product. Their answers might surprise you. Measure twice a month (the AI agent space is evolving rapidly). Set up a bi-weekly monitoring system to track your visibility and adapt accordingly.

4. Share this newsletter with friends. Be the friend lifting up those around you.

Don't let your brand become invisible in the AI age.

Stay curious, stay informed,

Allie

P.S. Should I dress up as an “AI agent” for Halloween this year? I like to plan excruciatingly early.

TAKE THE AI-FIRST QUIZ

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably not behind—but the clock is ticking.

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Feedback is a Gift

I would love to know what you thought of this newsletter and any feedback you have for me. Do you have a favorite part? Wish I would change something? Felt confused? Please reply and share your thoughts or just take the poll below so I can continue to improve and deliver value for you all.