The evolution of search won't stop with LLMs. The next stage involves autonomous AI agents that complete tasks like booking travel on a user's behalf. Marketers must shift their focus from answering human queries to ensuring their products and services are discoverable and selectable by these agents.
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Websites now have a dual purpose. A significant portion of your content must be created specifically for AI agents—niche, granular, and structured for LLM consumption to improve AEO. The human-facing part must then evolve to offer deeper, more interactive experiences, as visitors will arrive with their basic research already completed by AI.
As consumers delegate purchasing to personal AI agents, marketing's emotional appeals will fail. Brands must prepare for a "Business-to-Machine" (B2M) world where algorithms evaluate products on function and data, rendering decades of psychological tactics obsolete.
The audience for marketing content is expanding to include AI agents. Websites, for example, will need to be optimized not just for human users but also for AI crawlers that surface information in answer engines. This requires a fundamental shift in how marketers think about content structure and metadata.
As users delegate purchasing and research to AI agents, brands will lose control over the buyer's journey. Websites must be optimized for agent-to-agent communication, not just human interaction, as AI assistants will find, compare, and even purchase products autonomously.
The rise of AI agents means website traffic will increasingly be non-human. B2B marketers must rethink their playbooks to optimize for how AI models interpret and surface their content, a practice emerging as "AI Engine Optimization" (AEO), as agents become the primary researchers.
