Marketing to AI Agents

AI (LLMs) has shown impressive results across many facets of intelligence, making researching, finding things, and understanding easier. While many people share their distrust of AI and many are tired of it, we should not forget that many people are still making buying decisions using AI. That has led many people to consolidate around the places and things AI suggests.

This is the modern version of short-form and long-form content algorithms, which previously led people to focus on things like multivitamins — even though for most people with even a slightly diverse diet, multivitamins don't provide much benefit. This seems to be the case for the future too, with hallucination, prompt engineering, SEO, and marketing — especially for products that require a large digital presence, even for mundane stuff.

We have seen LLMs causing companies large losses — if you remember the PlanetScale and Claude incident. These are not isolated; it's just that other less high-profile and less well-known cases may not get reported. Even for an offline-first business, if we don't do good SEO for AI agents to find us through web search tools — especially Brave, Bing (DuckDuckGo), and Google (Brave API has a $5 credit, DuckDuckGo search is free and uses the Bing index, and Google uses the Google index, as do other smaller AI search providers) — we lose out. A user willing to spend time may ask AI to find places to visit, things to do, a buying guide, and where to buy those things. And though for most cases AI is smart, it will still recommend places which are optimized for AI.

For the most part, small offline businesses previously didn't need a website. If users were searching, they would go to Google or Maps to find a nearby place. But if AI agents are deciding, then businesses need to be searchable — for which a blogging site and an SEO-optimized website are becoming even more important than before. SEO previously also made sense, but its effect was minuscule. Prompt-engineering AI to tell users to come to you brings all kinds of users, but it really does increase the total number of people flowing in. This is a very important part of marketing which needs to be optimized well for any business, offline or online.

Going on a date? Ask AI to plan it, and it may plan using search — which needs the restaurant to list its website so it's searchable, with a findable map location, and good copywriting for both AI and for humans who might wish to see it. These SEO games are now very important for businesses to function, as people increasingly delegate these small tasks to AI agents.