AI search and agents aren’t a side channel anymore—they’re reshaping how content is discovered, interpreted, and acted on. The leaders will be the ones who retool their content, measurement, and technical infrastructure for bots first, humans second, without abandoning fundamentals.
- Reframe blog content goals: influence AI answers and agents, not just drive sessions and pageviews.
- Structure every article for machine comprehension—clean HTML, clear headings, TOCs, FAQs, and hyper-specific scenarios.
- Invest in visibility to AI crawlers with log analysis or tools like Dark Visitors, plus disciplined robots.txt governance.
- Continuously update your content library; “fresh” now means 3–6 months, not 3–6 years.
- Return to qualitative research—customer interviews, reviews, and forums—to fuel particular, ICP-aligned topics.
- Accept imperfect attribution; watch direct traffic and conversions as leading indicators of AI-driven discovery.
- For e-commerce, monitor early “agentic commerce” moves from major retailers before overbuilding your own stack.
The GEO Loop: A 6-Step System for AI-Ready SEO
Recalibrate Your Goal From Traffic to Influence
For two decades, the mental model was simple: publish a strong blog post, rank, earn traffic. AI answer engines fracture that equation. Your content now has to succeed even when it never generates a visit. The new goal is influence—shaping how large language models and agents respond—so leadership teams must stop judging content performance only by sessions and clicks.
Architect Content for Bots First, Humans as Validators
LLMs parse structure, signals, and specificity. That means disciplined use of headings, scannable sections, tables of contents, and embedded FAQs. Humans will still land on your pages, but increasingly to verify sensitive topics such as finance and medicine. Design the top of the page to answer what a human wants to confirm, and the deeper sections to give bots the nuance they need to learn.
Go Hyper-Specific Around Real People and Real Context
Prompts are personal: “I’m a parent of three kids under ten, traveling in August with a tight budget.” Content must mirror that specificity. Instead of broad, generic posts, create tightly focused articles that speak to narrow scenarios, personas, and constraints. These pieces may never be “big” traffic winners, but they are disproportionately powerful training signals for AI systems.
Re-Engineer Your Legacy Library for AI Crawlers
Your back catalog is either invisible to AI or quietly training it against you. Systematically refresh high-value articles: sharpen structure, add scenario-driven sections, and update examples or data. Frequent, meaningful updates increase the odds that AI crawlers revisit and incorporate your content, especially now that “old” can mean anything not touched in 3–6 months.
Instrument for AI Discovery and Access Control
You can’t optimize what you can’t see. Implement monitoring—via log files or tools like Dark Visitors—to identify which AI bots and agents hit your site and which URLs they favor or ignore. Use that visibility to refine robots.txt, disallow low-value or sensitive sections, and gently steer crawlers toward the content that best represents your expertise and offers.
Embrace Imperfect Attribution and Lead With Judgment
We’ve been trained to live and die by dashboards. AI breaks that comfort. Direct traffic and direct conversions are trending up across many sites; a non-trivial portion is likely AI-influenced yet unattributed. Executives must relearn how to make informed bets by combining directional data, trend watching, and qualitative signals, rather than waiting for pixel-perfect attribution that may never arrive.
SEO vs GEO vs Agentic Commerce: What Actually Changes?
Discipline | Primary Objective | Core Tactics | Key Leadership Question |
|---|---|---|---|
Traditional SEO | Earn rankings and organic traffic from search engines. | Keyword targeting, on-page optimization, backlinks, technical crawlability, and site speed. | “How do we grow qualified organic sessions and conversions from Google and other engines?” |
GEO / AEO (Generative/Answer Engine Optimization) | Influence AI-generated answers and recommendations. | Structured content, hyper-specific scenarios, FAQs, frequent updates, and AI-bot accessibility. | “How do we become the source AI systems rely on when our ICP asks complex, contextual questions?” |
Agentic Commerce | Enable AI agents to research, compare, and transact on behalf of users. | Machine-readable product data, protocols such as emerging agentic commerce standards, robust APIs, and inventory and pricing clarity. | “When an agent shops for our ideal customer, what data does it see, and can it complete the purchase without a human?” |
Leadership Insights: Hard Questions for an AI-Search Future
How should our content strategy shift if the majority of our best articles never generate visible traffic?
Answer: You have to decouple “value” from “visits.” Define a portion of your editorial calendar explicitly for AI influence—pieces aimed at answering nuanced, ICP-specific scenarios that are unlikely to rank broadly but are highly likely to be surfaced in AI responses. Success metrics shift from sessions to downstream indicators: lifts in direct traffic conversions, higher close rates from prospects who “came in informed,” and qualitative feedback from sales about prospect knowledge and terminology.
What does it practically mean to “write for bots first” without degrading human experience?
Answer: It means treating structure as a first-class strategic asset. Start with a clear outline mapped to intent clusters and real prompts, enforce semantic headings (H1–H3), build a table of contents that reflects how someone might query an AI, and embed concise FAQ blocks written in natural question form. Then layer in human-friendly narrative, examples, and stories. The page reads well to a person, yet is immediately digestible to crawlers and models.
Where should we start if our blog is already hundreds of posts deep and mostly generic?
Answer: Don’t try to boil the ocean. Audit your top 20–40 URLs by revenue influence, not by raw traffic. For each, ask: Does this reflect our current ICP, our current offers, and the specific situations people actually face? Then prioritize a wave of updates: sharpen the focus on one persona per article, add scenario-driven sections, improve internal linking, and ensure technical cleanliness. You’ll get more AI leverage from 30 sharp, current pieces than from 300 aging, vague ones.
How can we bring qualitative research back without slowing the team down?
Answer: Make it a lightweight, recurring habit instead of a giant “research project.” Have marketing, sales, or success conduct three to five short customer conversations per month with a simple script: recent challenges, questions before purchase, frustrations with alternatives, and how they went about researching vendors. Supplement that with monthly reviews of competitor reviews and relevant Reddit threads. Feed the language and themes directly into your content briefs so your AI-oriented articles echo the exact voice.
As leaders, how do we decide how much to invest in emerging areas like agentic commerce when the data isn’t there yet?
Answer: Treat it as a staged innovation portfolio, not a binary decision. Carve out a small, explicit experimentation budget and timeline—enough to monitor standards like the agentic commerce protocol, run limited pilots on a subset of products, and integrate learnings without overcommitting. Watch what major retailers and platforms prove out over a peak season before scaling. Your job is to be early enough to learn, but disciplined enough not to overbuild speculative infrastructure.
Author: Emanuel Rose, Senior Marketing Executive, Strategic eMarketing
Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emanuelrose
Last updated:
- Conversation with Matthew Edgar on “Marketing in the Age of AI” podcast (technical SEO, AI search, GEO/AEO).
- Matthew Edgar, “Tech SEO Guide” (Apress, 2023).
- Matthew Edgar, “Speed Metrics Guide” (Apress, 2024).
- Industry reporting on AI referrer traffic and direct traffic trends (e.g., Search Engine Land / Search Engine Journal, 2024).
About Strategic eMarketing: Strategic eMarketing designs and executes measurable, AI-informed marketing systems for growth-minded organizations that want more revenue and more time back in their day.
https://strategicemarketing.com/about
https://www.linkedin.com/company/strategic-emarketing
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-in-the-age-of-ai
https://open.spotify.com/show/marketing-in-the-age-of-ai
https://www.youtube.com/@EmanuelRose
Guest Spotlight
Guest: Matthew Edgar
Company: Elementive (https://www.elementive.com)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewedgar/
Website: https://MatthewEdgar.net
Bio: Matthew Edgar is a partner at Elementive, a Colorado-based consulting firm specializing in technical SEO, AI search optimization, and website performance. With over twenty years of experience, he helps startups, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies resolve complex technical issues and optimize their websites for both AI-driven and traditional search. He is the author of “Tech SEO Guide” (Apress, 2023) and “Speed Metrics Guide” (Apress, 2024) and has spoken at industry-leading events, including MozCon, SMX, and MarTech. Matthew holds a Master’s in Information and Communications Technology from the University of Denver.
Episode: Marketing in the Age of AI with guest Matthew Edgar (recorded for release around November 17, 2025).
Contact: matthew@elementive.com
About the Host
Emanuel Rose is a senior marketing executive and author of “Authentic Marketing in the Age of AI.” He leads Strategic eMarketing, helping companies integrate AI tools with proven direct response fundamentals to generate leads and reclaim time for what actually matters. Connect with Emanuel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emanuelrose.
From Concept to Action: Your Next 30 Days
Audit one slice of your content, monitor your AI bot traffic, and update a handful of high-value pages with sharper structure and more specific scenarios. At the same time, schedule a few short customer conversations and feed what you learn straight into new, AI-oriented articles. If you execute those simple moves over the next month, you’ll be materially better positioned for answer engines and agents than most of your competitors.