Marketing to AI agents means earning inclusion in the shortlist an agent builds for its user, not capturing a human's attention. The unit of success shifts from the impression or click to the citation and the recommendation.
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What changes
- From persuasion to legibility: agents do not respond to imagery or copy. They respond to structured, verifiable facts.
- From ranking to citation: the goal is to be the source an agent quotes and the option it selects. See optimising for AI agents.
- From funnels to constraints: agents filter on explicit user constraints (price, delivery, ratings, policy). Meet the constraint or be excluded.
- From brand impressions to brand facts: what an agent can verify about you, ratings, policies, provenance, becomes your brand.
What marketers should do
- Ensure every claim a buyer cares about exists as structured data, not just marketing copy.
- Answer real questions plainly, so answer engines can lift a self-contained response.
- Build and expose genuine trust signals: reviews, return and shipping policies, provenance.
- Allow AI crawlers and publish an llms.txt so you can be discovered and cited.
- Measure agent-driven referrals and conversions as a distinct channel (see measurement).
What not to do
Do not try to manipulate model outputs with keyword stuffing or fabricated authority. Agents and answer engines increasingly weight verifiable, sourced information; the durable strategy is to be genuinely useful and machine-legible. Analysis
Then make yourself sellable
Discovery is only half of it. Make products purchasable by agents.