While customers pay attention to what companies and brands do with their communication strategies, the rise of AI can pull their attention away from traditional browsing during e-commerce shopping. AI agents, which can take actions based on preferences “learned” from users, could make online shopping even more targeted. Adrien Menard, CEO and cofounder of retail SEO and GEO platform Botify says, “We are seeing an increase in the traffic on websites by bots and by AI agents. The AI agents are going to browse the web, search for information, visit websites and potentially make a decision on the behalf of the consumer or everyone. This is [in the] early stage of what it can be in a few years from now, but is a reality. And the reality is that when you’re a brand, you need to take that into consideration, because those AI agents deserve the best user experience. I think it’s fascinating because it means that the value chain of the traffic acquisition of a retail company and the loyalty program that you can put in place, everything is going to be redefined because you’re not going to market your solution the same way to a consumer or to an AI agent. It means that brands need to refine their measurement framework. They need to have KPIs in every step of the AI search process. It’s about the quality of the website, the indexation of the website in Google, ChatGPT, etc. It’s about understanding how people search on Google and on ChatGPT, and see if there are differences. It’s about measuring your share of voice when someone is searching with keywords, or with prompts related to what you can have available on the website. And, of course, it’s about understanding the contribution to the revenue of those channels. This is the AI search panel, and brands need to be equipped with the right analytics for each stage. The second step is once you know what is happening, you want to influence the AI search process, particularly the indexation and the interactions made by the AI search with your website. Before AI search systems can generate an answer, they first need to know everything about your brand. They need to know who you are, your turnover, your product, your product availability, the reviews, the prices, the marketing strategy, et cetera. To do so, they need to capture your website and put it back into their indexation or learning database. This is a process that should be optimized. This is the very first action that needs to be taken because if the system doesn’t understand who you are and what you have available on the website, they will never reuse it to generate the answer. This is even more critical when you consider that the internet is changing all the time. Prices are updated every day. Stock availability is, by definition, updated the minute something is purchased. The reviews, same thing. There are processes that can be done automatically that guarantee that your content is understood by the AI search system. This is the reality of what we have been doing with the customers, and what has impacted tremendously their visibility, traffic, and revenue impact generated by these emerging AI search systems.