57.4% of web traffic is now generated by AI agents. Not humans. Bots. Reading your website right now — your product descriptions, your blog posts, your about page, your reviews — and deciding whether to recommend you or your competitor.
Most ecommerce brands have absolutely no idea what to do about it.
The New Reality: You're Marketing to Two Audiences at Once
Think about this for a second. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's AI assistant for the best natural moisturiser, the best recovery supplement, or the best functional snack — that AI goes and reads websites to form its answer.
It reads your product descriptions. Your blog posts. Your about page. Your reviews. And then it decides whether to recommend you — or your competitor.
"While you're reading this, an AI is recommending your competitor to someone who would have been your customer."
I tested this recently. I asked Gemini: "What's the best magnesium supplement brand for sleep?" It gave me three brand names. Only one of them was running Meta ads. Only one was at the top of Google rankings. But they all had one thing in common — they were optimised for AI to find, parse and recommend them.
That's the new game. And most brands don't even know it exists.
You are now marketing to two completely different audiences at the same time:
- AI agents — crawling your site 24/7, deciding if you deserve a recommendation
- Real humans — your actual customers, buying, deciding, experiencing
Most brands are only optimising for one of them.
What Is AEO — And Why It Matters More Than SEO Right Now
The new SEO is called AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation. Instead of optimising only for Google rankings, you optimise to appear in AI-generated answers. The difference between a brand that gets recommended by ChatGPT or Perplexity and one that doesn't often comes down to one thing: how you write about your product.
AI models don't reward keyword stuffing. They reward clarity, structure and authority. They're looking for content that directly and confidently answers the questions real customers are asking. They want specificity, not vague marketing language.
Three Things to Do for AI Visibility Right Now
- Write content that directly answers real customer questions. Not "our collagen is the best quality." Instead: "Our marine collagen contains 10g of hydrolysed Type I collagen per serving — the form most readily absorbed by the body." Specific, structured, answerable.
- Make your brand claims specific and easy for an AI to parse. Use clear headings, bullet points and structured product descriptions. AI models read HTML structure — a well-formatted page is easier to extract and recommend than a wall of paragraphs.
- Track your AI visibility the way you track Google rankings. Tools like OtterlyAI and Goodie let you monitor whether your brand appears in AI-generated answers for your key search terms. If you're not tracking it, you don't know if you're winning or losing.
The bottom line on AEO: AI tools recommend brands that sound like authoritative experts answering specific questions — not brands that sound like they're running an ad. Every piece of content you write should be designed to answer a question someone would actually ask an AI assistant.
For Real Humans: Invest in the Channels AI Can't Touch
Here's the other side of this equation that most brands miss. As AI saturates the digital landscape, the highest-trust moments are increasingly happening offline. The brands that figure this out now will own both channels.
- Events, pop-ups and wellness fairs — real people, real trust, real conversations. No AI replicates a face-to-face product experience.
- Product sampling — let people feel, taste, smell and try what you sell. First-hand experience creates the kind of conviction no recommendation engine can manufacture.
- Community — a running club, a sleep challenge, a skincare ritual. Loyalty built around shared experience is the moat no algorithm can disrupt.
- Retail — physical shelf presence becomes a trust signal in an AI-saturated world. Being somewhere tangible matters more, not less.
The Connected Strategy
The brands that win in this new environment aren't choosing between AI optimisation and human connection. They're building a system where each reinforces the other.
Your AEO-optimised content gets recommended by AI → the human lands on your site → your landing page converts them → your email retention brings them back → your community keeps them loyal → your events deepen the relationship.
Every channel connected. Every touchpoint intentional. That's what a modern ecommerce growth system looks like.
The internet has changed. The question is whether your brand has changed with it. The brands building for both AI and human audiences right now are laying the foundations for the next three to five years of growth. The ones waiting are falling further behind every day.
See what this looks like for your brand
Book a free 20-30 minute Audit Call. We'll walk through exactly what a connected growth system looks like for your specific brand — including how to position for AI search.
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