During a job interview with a well-known over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceutical company in the 1990s, the brand team shared something that stuck with me: If a consumer tried the generic version of their flagship over-the-counter pain reliever, they considered that customer lost to the brand forever.
The reason? In the US, generics and name-brand OTC products are regulated identically. That CVS-branded pain reliever? It’s identical in ingredients, efficacy, and manufacturing oversight to the more expensive branded product. Generic pain relievers have dominated in my medicine cabinet ever since.
At the time, I thought this was just an interesting insight about consumer behavior, brand loyalty, and government regulation. I didn’t realize I was getting a preview of what would be happening across all industries thirty years later.
So now, just when you and your team had the SEO for your website all figured out, along comes AAO! AAO stands for AI Agent Optimization, and it’s forcing marketers to rethink how their businesses and brands will be discovered and understood by artificial intelligence rather than by humans.
An AI agent is software that can browse, compare, and purchase products on behalf of users. Think of it as having a tireless research assistant who can instantly access product specs, read thousands of reviews, compare prices across retailers, and make recommendations based on your specific needs. When someone asks their AI agent to “find the best phone charger for international travel,” that agent methodically evaluates options using objective criteria—not flashy marketing claims.
Several of the key ramifications for brands and marketers were laid out in a Harvard Business Review article earlier this year: AI Agents Are Changing How People Shop. Here’s What It Means for Brands. As a marketer, I was relieved to see that several fundamental components of marketing messaging will become even more important in this new, AI-dominated world.
Here are my four key takeaways from the shift to AI agent shopping:
- Clear positioning matters more than ever. A specific articulation of why your product meets the customer’s unmet need better, stronger, faster is critical for showing AI agents that you’re the real deal. If you need a positioning refresher, watch our webinar, Positioning: Laying the Foundation for Sales and Marketing Success.
- Generic superiority claims are finally dying. AI agents will be even less swayed by homepage declarations like “Premier,” “Highest Quality,” “Proven Leaders,” “World’s Leading/Largest,” and platitudes like “Customized Solutions” than actual humans were. (I won’t shed any tears for their demise.)
- Specificity wins. The article’s example of “Best phone charger for travel” is a great model for how you might want to think about your product’s key use cases. AI agents respond to concrete, substantiated claims rather than vague promises.
- Reviews become even more influential. Product reviews will be more important than ever because they provide the authentic, experience-based data that AI agents look for to evaluate real-world product performance.
Three things you can do now to ensure your website is more relevant to AI agents:
- Tighten up your positioning statement if you haven’t already done so. Remember that identifying your customer’s specific Unmet Need will be critical to nail down. Focus on the concrete use cases you know to be true rather than wishful thinking.
- Include comprehensive product reviews on your site. Encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews that highlight specific use cases. This helps AI agents as they analyze review sentiment and specific mentions to determine your product’s suitability for the need they’re shopping for.
- Create content that addresses specific customer needs and use cases. Develop content that clearly connects your products to specific problems customers are trying to solve. Instead of “high-quality phone charger,” create content around “fastest charging solution for international business travelers” or “most reliable backup power for outdoor photographers.”
For a great example of how consumers are already using AI for shopping, Wall Street Journal reporter Alexandra Samuel recently wrote about her experience in Meet My Favorite Shopping Companion Ever: AI. It’s a firsthand account of how consumers are beginning to rely on AI agents for product research and recommendations, particularly for purchases where performance matters more than the brand.
This brings me back to that pharmaceutical company insight from decades ago. When consumers have access to unbiased information about product performance—now through their AI agents—they will most likely make more objective purchasing decisions. Now the AI agent will easily discover that the generic pain reliever has identical ingredients and efficacy as part of completing its shopping mission, and your brand needs to be ready for this level of transparency.
The companies that will thrive in this new environment will not only deliver superior value, they will also be able to clearly articulate that value in ways that both humans and AI agents can understand and verify. It’s not about gaming another algorithm—it’s about getting back to authentic marketing fundamentals in a world where information asymmetry is disappearing fast.