As AI agents and synthesized search become intermediaries, traditional channels are insufficient. The new imperative is ensuring your brand’s data is accessible to AI models as they reason and generate responses, directly influencing the outcome before it reaches the consumer.
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Influencing AI results isn't about traditional SEO tactics. It's about getting your brand mentioned in the sources AI models are trained on, like Reddit, industry publications, and news articles. The most effective way to achieve this is through modern PR and consistent social media activity, as journalists and writers use these platforms for discovery.
The traditional goal of winning hearts and minds is now a two-step process. Marketers must first win over the "machines"—search algorithms and LLMs—that control 85% of content discovery, treating them as an influential, gatekeeping audience.
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.
Just as a brand negotiates for shelf space with Walmart, it must also "sell" to AI algorithms. This means feeding them content that proves the brand drives "category growth" for the platform, thereby earning preferential treatment and visibility.
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.
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.
Marketers must evolve from SEO to GEO, optimizing content for how brands appear in LLM results. This requires a new content strategy that treats the LLM as a distinct persona or channel, creating content specifically for it to crawl and ensuring accurate brand representation.
Brands will need a bifurcated approach for marketing. One strategy will focus on creating authentic content for human connection, while a separate, distinct strategy must structure information to be effectively parsed and prioritized by the AI agents that increasingly intermediate the customer journey.
The future role of a marketer is not as a channel expert (e.g., search marketer) but as an orchestrator of AI systems. They will design the logic, goals, and audience strategy that AI agents execute. Core skills will shift from production tasks to taste, judgment, and narrative craft.
As users increasingly get answers from AI assistants, marketing strategy must evolve from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). This means creating diverse, authoritative content across multiple platforms (podcasts, PR, articles) with the goal of being cited as a trusted source by AI models themselves.
