WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:18.275 In the next twelve months, millions of people will stop searching for products and start letting AI agents buy for them. The companies they choose will see a massive surge in revenue. The companies they skip will never even know they were in the running. This is the biggest shift in how customers find businesses since the invention of Google, 00:00:18.435 --> 00:00:31.000 and almost no one is talking about it. I'm Neil Patel. I'm the cofounder of NP Digital. We're the performance marketing agency of the year by Ad Age. And in this video, I'm gonna show you how AI agents actually shop, 00:00:31.240 --> 00:00:40.545 how they scan, compare, and decide who gets the sale. Then I'll walk through exactly what to change on your website so these agents choose you every time. 00:00:45.185 --> 00:01:09.735 There have been exactly two massive shifts in how people find businesses online. The first was the desktop Internet. Google launch and suddenly, if your business showed up on page one, you won. The companies that learned SEO early dominated for a decade before the competitors even understood what happened. The second was mobile. Smartphones change everything. The businesses that went mobile first, responsive sites, fast load times, apps, 00:01:09.975 --> 00:01:12.535 captured market share, they still hold today. 00:01:12.855 --> 00:01:16.855 The ones that waited, a lot of them never recovered. Right now, 00:01:17.095 --> 00:01:20.055 we're standing at the beginning of the third shift. 00:01:20.375 --> 00:01:25.050 This one's different because the first two shifts change how people search. 00:01:25.370 --> 00:01:40.505 This shift changes who is doing the search. It's not your customer browsing your website anymore. It's their AI agent, scan your site, pulling your data, comparing you against 30 competitors in a second, and making a recommendation 00:01:40.585 --> 00:01:52.640 before a human ever sees your page. This isn't coming in five years. ChatGPT already has shopping features. Perplexity is recommending products. Google is building agents directly into Chrome. 00:01:52.800 --> 00:02:02.800 It's happening now. And here's where it gets really interesting because this shift doesn't change how people find you. It rewrites the entire customer journey from scratch. 00:02:07.885 --> 00:02:13.805 For twenty five years, the customer journey looked the same. Someone has a problem, they search Google, 00:02:13.885 --> 00:02:19.170 they click a few links, they browse some websites, they compare options, they make a decision. 00:02:19.650 --> 00:02:22.130 Humans were doing the work at every single stage. 00:02:22.530 --> 00:02:29.810 That's ending. Here's what's happening instead. Someone tells your a a agent, find me the best marketing agency for my ecommerce 00:02:29.810 --> 00:02:43.865 brand under 5,000 a month. The agent goes out, visits dozens of websites, post pricing, services, reviews, case studies, cross references that against brand mentions and third party data, comes back with three recommendations. 00:02:43.945 --> 00:02:47.810 The human picks one, done. They never visited a single site. 00:02:48.290 --> 00:02:53.170 Think about what just happened there. The entire funnel awareness consideration decision 00:02:53.330 --> 00:02:56.050 got compressed into one AI conversation. 00:02:56.370 --> 00:03:06.715 The website didn't need to convince a human. It needed to convince an agent. And that agent doesn't care about your beautiful design, doesn't care about your brand colors, or your clever headline. 00:03:06.715 --> 00:03:13.515 It cares about one thing, can I extract clear structured information from this site that helps my human make a decision? 00:03:14.090 --> 00:03:14.970 If yes, 00:03:15.290 --> 00:03:18.170 you make the shortlist. If no, you don't exist. 00:03:18.570 --> 00:03:20.410 So the obvious question is, 00:03:20.970 --> 00:03:32.645 what exactly are the agents looking for? Because once you understand that, you can reverse engineer exactly what to do. And this is the part that almost nobody is explaining clearly yet. 00:03:37.605 --> 00:03:51.370 AI agents don't read your website the way a person does. A person scrolls, skims, gets a feel for your brand, and an agent scans your code looking for specific signals. Here's what they're evaluating. First, structured data, 00:03:51.530 --> 00:03:54.010 schema markup, and JSON LD. 00:03:54.410 --> 00:04:03.215 This is a language AI agents speak. It tells them exactly what your page is about, what you sell, what it costs, and who it's for. Without it, you're invisible. 00:04:03.695 --> 00:04:07.535 Second, content clarity. Not clever marking copy, clear, 00:04:08.175 --> 00:04:09.535 machine readable information. 00:04:10.080 --> 00:04:13.360 What do you offer? How does it work? What's the pricing? 00:04:13.600 --> 00:04:18.000 If the answers are buried in five paragraphs of brand storytelling, 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:26.295 the agent skips you. And here's something most people don't realize. The same things that make your site accessible to people with disabilities, 00:04:26.775 --> 00:04:27.655 ARIA 00:04:27.655 --> 00:04:30.535 tags, clean HTML structure, clear labels, 00:04:30.775 --> 00:04:35.735 those are now the exact same things that make your site visible to AI agents. 00:04:35.815 --> 00:04:39.175 Accessibility for humans became visibility for AI. 00:04:39.815 --> 00:04:41.860 Third, API compatibility. 00:04:42.580 --> 00:04:52.980 Agents aren't just reading text. They're looking for connections they can plug into. If an AI can check your inventory, pull pricing, or book an appointment through a clean API, 00:04:53.140 --> 00:05:05.485 you win. If it has to guess by scraping your homepage, you lose. Google just launched something called the universal commerce protocol. That lets the agent handle everything from discovery to checkout. 00:05:05.645 --> 00:05:08.760 The sites that plug into this kind of thing first get the sales. 00:05:09.000 --> 00:05:11.960 Fourth, your reputation across the web. 00:05:12.120 --> 00:05:26.065 Agents don't just read your website. They cross reference everything. Brand mentions, reviews, sentiment, citations, other content. If no one else on the internet is talking about you, the agent doesn't trust you. Fifth, freshness. 00:05:26.545 --> 00:05:33.105 When was this information last updated? AI agents heavily favor current data. If your pages look stale, 00:05:33.665 --> 00:05:35.425 you look unreliable. 00:05:36.065 --> 00:05:47.050 Now, here's what's wild about this. Most of those signals, they're the same thing that helped you rank in traditional SEO, structured data, clear content, strong brand presence, fresh information. 00:05:47.130 --> 00:05:54.135 The difference is for AI agents, these aren't nice to haves. They're requirements. Miss one, and you're out. 00:05:54.615 --> 00:06:02.055 But here's the good news. Most of your competitors have no idea this is happening. The bar to stand out right now is shockingly low. 00:06:02.215 --> 00:06:31.005 You just have to be ready before they are, and that's exactly what I'm about to show you. But before I do, if you want my company to just help you get set up for this new world of AI agents and make sure your marketing is intact so you could be getting the sales, check us out at NP Digital where we help companies across all industries and all sizes even in different languages all across throughout the world, helping them not only optimize for traditional SEO, but also LLMs 00:06:31.005 --> 00:06:32.365 and even AI agents. 00:06:37.710 --> 00:06:44.270 Now here are the five changes that make your website AI agent ready. Most of these, you can do in a week. 00:06:45.470 --> 00:06:46.350 Step one, 00:06:46.910 --> 00:06:53.375 add schema markup to every important page. Product schema, service schema, FAQ schema, review schema, 00:06:53.615 --> 00:07:11.050 this is the single highest impacting you can do. It takes an afternoon, and it makes every AA agent on the Internet able to understand exactly what you offer. Think of it like putting a name tag at a networking event, except the event has a thousand people and everyone without a name tag is invisible. 00:07:11.370 --> 00:07:12.330 Step two, 00:07:12.730 --> 00:07:15.290 rewrite your key pages for clarity, 00:07:15.530 --> 00:07:16.650 not cleverness. 00:07:16.970 --> 00:07:19.530 Every page should answer four questions 00:07:19.575 --> 00:07:33.335 in a plain language. What do you sell? Who's it for? What does it cost? How does it work? Header, short paragraphs, tables where it makes sense, you're writing for a very smart, very literal reader with zero patience. 00:07:33.940 --> 00:07:37.940 Step three, open your site to agent interactions. If you sell products, 00:07:38.100 --> 00:07:42.740 make sure your inventory and pricing are accessible through clean data feeds or APIs. 00:07:42.820 --> 00:07:44.020 If you sell services, 00:07:44.180 --> 00:07:56.265 make sure your scheduling and availability is easy for agent to query. The businesses that let agents plug in directly, check stock, compare specs, and even complete a purchase, those are the ones that get recommended first. 00:07:56.585 --> 00:07:57.545 Step four, 00:07:58.105 --> 00:08:00.345 build your brand signal everywhere. 00:08:00.745 --> 00:08:02.825 Get mentioned in industry publications. 00:08:03.200 --> 00:08:05.920 Earn reviews on relevant platforms. 00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:15.440 Create content other sites want to reference. A agents trust you more when the rest of the Internet vouches for you. Step five, 00:08:15.600 --> 00:08:21.245 keep everything current. Add last updated dates to your pages. Refresh your core content quarterly. 00:08:21.405 --> 00:08:25.645 Update your reviews and case studies. Stale content is a trust killer for agents. 00:08:26.205 --> 00:08:26.845 Now, 00:08:27.085 --> 00:08:31.725 there's a sixth move, and this is one that creates real long term advantage. 00:08:32.180 --> 00:08:38.740 Create content that teaches AI who you are and what category you own. Don't just say, we're a marketing agency. 00:08:38.820 --> 00:08:45.700 Say, we help SaaS companies scale from 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 through performance marketing. Create comparison pages. 00:08:45.780 --> 00:08:49.115 Build category specific guides. Publish listicles 00:08:49.115 --> 00:09:03.220 that position you as authority in your niche if you really are the authority in your niche. Don't lie. The specificity trains the AI. The more specific and consistent you are, the more AI agents associate your brand with that category. 00:09:03.300 --> 00:09:05.300 And once you own that association, 00:09:05.540 --> 00:09:07.700 that's when the real compounding starts. 00:09:08.260 --> 00:09:16.435 Now all that is a playbook, and it works. But there's something even more important than what to do, and that's when you do it. 00:09:21.555 --> 00:09:31.730 Every major Internet shift has had a window, a period where the early movers locked in advantages that lasted years. The businesses that figured out SEO in 2003, 00:09:31.730 --> 00:09:36.530 some still rank on page one. The brands that went mobile first in 2010, 00:09:36.610 --> 00:09:51.635 they captured market share they hold today. The Gentic Web has a window too, and it's smaller than any window that came before it. And here's why. AI adoption is moving faster than anything we've seen. Gartner is predicting that by 2028, 00:09:51.715 --> 00:09:57.690 a massive percentage of both b to b and b to c transactions will involve AA agents in the decision. 00:09:58.170 --> 00:10:01.690 What took mobile five years to reach mainstream adoption? 00:10:01.690 --> 00:10:05.690 AA agents will do it in twelve to eighteen months. 00:10:06.250 --> 00:10:11.525 That means the early mover window isn't three to five years. It's measured in months. 00:10:12.005 --> 00:10:16.965 And once AI agents learn which brands to recommend in the category, those recommendations 00:10:16.965 --> 00:10:17.845 compound. 00:10:18.085 --> 00:10:19.445 The more recommendations 00:10:19.525 --> 00:10:28.320 lead to more traffic. More traffic leads to more data. More data leads to more authority. More authority leads to more recommendations. 00:10:28.400 --> 00:10:34.240 It's a flywheel, and the businesses that get on it first spin faster every single day. 00:10:34.560 --> 00:10:40.875 The businesses that wait, they're fighting a uphill battle against competitors who are already the default recommendation. 00:10:41.275 --> 00:10:53.140 That's the real opportunity here. Not AI content tools, not chat GPT tricks. The real play is making sure that when AI agents start doing the buying and they already are, they're buying from you. 00:10:53.940 --> 00:11:01.075 Most of your competitors won't watch this video. Most won't even take action even if they do. That's your advantage. Use it. 00:11:01.555 --> 00:11:07.635 If you wanna see how AI search is already reshaping which businesses get found, watch this video next.