Brands Need to Stand Out as Bots Begin Buying

In a significant shift that’s reshaping digital commerce, payment giants including PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard are betting big on agentic payments, allowing AI assistants to shop and pay on consumers’ behalf. This new era signals a fundamental transformation in how brands must approach digital marketing.

The transition is already well underway. According to a 2025 Capgemini study, 58% of consumers have replaced traditional search engines with generative AI tools for product recommendations in 2024, more than doubling from 25% in 2023.

As these AI intermediaries increasingly control the marketing funnel, marketers face a critical question: How do you design advertising when your target audience isn’t human? Such a monumental change demands entirely new advertising approaches when your customer operates on logic rather than emotion. 

The consumer journey is rapidly evolving from human-driven to AI-mediated and, eventually, AI-autonomous, as illustrated in Bain & Company’s recent analysis. The research shows how each stage of the purchase process, from recognizing needs to final purchase, is increasingly happening within AI tools with minimal human engagement.

The implications for marketers are profound. As Bain notes, “In the old order, when a prospect didn’t convert, the company at least had the breadcrumbs of page views, ad impressions, form fills, or email sign-ups, enabling marketers to follow up. But the AI-powered funnel shuts out sellers well before the journey reaches them. Discovery, evaluation, and short-listing all happen inside the AI tool.” This invisibility creates an existential challenge: Unless a brand surfaces at the moment of AI evaluation or is already top-of-mind for the buyer, it might never make the consideration set.

Forget aspirational imagery, cultural resonance, or emotional storytelling. AI agents evaluate products based on hard facts, technical details, and specific numbers when deciding what to recommend. As these AI agents evaluate options quicker and more comprehensively than human shoppers ever could, brands must optimize specifically for AI evaluation to remain visible in this new landscape.

Creative development undergoes radical transformation when targeting machines: Ad copy must shift from persuasive messaging to precise product descriptions. Visual assets become less about aesthetic appeal and more about clear information hierarchy. Brand voice matters less to AI than consistent, machine-readable data structures that align with AI evaluation criteria.

Rather than focusing solely on keywords, advertisers must now optimize for how AI surfaces information across evolving search experiences and conversational interfaces. This represents a seismic shift from traditional SEO, optimizing not just for human discovery, but for algorithmic preference. 

This new landscape requires mastering several strategies to ensure AI visibility:

• Brand embeddings—establishing your brand as a recognized entity in AI knowledge bases through Wikipedia presence, consistent business listings, and structured data markup.
• Answer-focused content—creating concise, direct responses to questions in formats AI can easily digest and reference.
• Strategic user-generated content—cultivating positive UGC on platforms that feed AI training data.
• Technical standards—implementing emerging protocols like llms.txt that guide how AI systems interact with your content.

When optimizing for these strategies, prioritize content characteristics that AI platforms favor, including rich, conversational text; agent-friendly structures like ordered lists and definitions; clean, scrapable sites rather than keyword-stuffed pages; off-site earned authority through media citations; and positive user reviews.

In addition to the process, success metrics must also transform accordingly. Click-through rates and engagement give way to algorithm inclusion rates, AI recommendation frequency, and conversion efficiency through autonomous agents. A recent eMarketer report estimates that agents will likely take over a sizable chunk of the consideration phase; as a result, this forces marketers to develop direct integration pathways with AI systems rather than relying on traditional advertising channels alone.

To navigate this new reality, forward-thinking brands should:

• Develop an AI-optimized strategy. Establish a comprehensive approach that ensures brand visibility across all AI systems, from search engines and conversational agents to autonomous shopping assistants and predictive AI systems. This includes refining content for AI comprehension, implementing structured data, and embedding brand attributes that align with algorithmic evaluation criteria.
• Redefine success metrics. Traditional digital marketing KPIs like impressions and click-through rates become less relevant when AI mediates consumer interactions. Companies like Profound and Brandlight offer specialized monitoring tools to track AI visibility, recommendation frequency, and automated brand consideration rates. These tools simulate agent evaluations across various parameters, revealing optimization opportunities hidden in the “black box” of algorithmic decision-making.
• Implement continuous algorithmic testing. Unlike traditional A/B testing aimed at human psychology, companies must now establish dynamic testing protocols that identify which product attributes, content structures, and data signals most effectively influence AI recommendations.

The Rise of Agentic AI Could Be a Return to Form for the Internet

As this new advertising paradigm evolves, industry standards will become essential, establishing ethical boundaries for algorithmic persuasion, clear guidelines for brand representation, product differentiation, and ensuring transparency in machine-to-machine marketing.

The next evolution of marketing will require a fundamental recalibration of what constitutes value and influence. Brands must now encode their advantages in formats that AI can process while preserving the distinctiveness and emotional resonance that ultimately matters to humans.

This isn’t simply a new channel or tactic—it represents a structural reformation of how products connect with consumers. This next age of advertising will be won by those who speak fluent algorithm and tap into human emotions, all at the same time.