Google Just Confirmed It. Your Next Customer Might Be an AI Agent. | AJ Ghergich, Botify [Part 2 of 3]

Hey, real quick before we get into this, here's something that I've been noticing lately, and I'm seeing this with a lot of love. A lot of really smart marketers are jumping straight to the tools. They're on LinkedIn, they're asking, "Hey, what's the best say I've visibility tracker? Should we be using this tool or should we be using that one?" And these are all really good questions, but I'm seeing a pattern when we're reaching for the tools before we actually understand the fundamentals of how AI search works, like why some brands get cited and others don't, or what signals AI engines are actually looking for, or how citation and trust scores actually function. So I'm working to fix that. I'm in the planning stages of a free GEO course, a how-to GEO kind of thing, that walks you through the foundations before the tactics, because one to understand how it actually works, the tools start making sense. Without that foundation, you're really just buying a dashboard. The course is free, it's going to go live on YouTube and the podcast, and there's going to be a workbook to go with it, so that you can take notes and apply what you're learning. The newsletter is the first place I'm announcing it when it goes live, so sign up for the visibility report to get on the list, and you'll know the minute that it drops. Okay, to the episode. Hey, welcome back to found an AI. Before we get into it, I want to give a quick apology to my six a.m. listeners, a faithful few. I know some of you have the show in your ears on the way into the office on Tuesday mornings. I did not drop this yesterday for scheduled upload for six a.m. today. Yesterday here in the US was a holiday. I did not touch anything work related all weekend. I rested, and by rested, I mean I napped a lot. I hope you got some rest into or some sunshine. It rained here where I am the entire weekend, but it was still a good weekend overall. Anyway, we were back at it today. We have a lot to get into. I'm Cassie Clark, a fractional contours strategist in an AI search optimization expert, evidently also a professional rapper. This is found in AI at the show for marketers and founders who want to understand what's actually happening in AI search, not just the hype that you're seeing on LinkedIn or Reddit or X or whatever you're getting your information. If you listened to last week's episode, you heard part one of my conversation with AJ Gurkage, who leads the consulting and AI team at modify. We got into wire dashboards are lying to you, specifically the bot traffic surge, and the shift from clicks a clicks mindset to visibility mindset. If you missed it, definitely go back and listen to it. There was a lot of good information there. In that episode, I mentioned I had the plan to release the AI governance conversation that AJ and I had as part two this week. I'm swapping that order because AJ and I talked in part three about agentic commerce and that lines almost perfectly, almost perfectly could not have planned it better with what Google announced last week at Google I/O. I'm not going to wait make you wait another week for a conversation that is super relevant right now. So I'm going to go ahead and just reorder reorder what I had planned in release now. So here's where we are. Last week Google I/O confirmed two very important things that should be on your radar. The first is information agents. Those are background AI agents that monitor the web 24/7. They synthesize updates and surface recommendations to users without a single search query. Users just go in there and they set up something that they want to monitor and the agents do it continuously over and over and over. The second is universal cart. This is built on Google's universal commerce protocol. It's a Gemini power shopping experience that works across search and eventually YouTube and Gmail. The handle is deal tracking, price history and eventually check out all on behalf of the user. The customer is becoming an agent and the agent is deciding which brands get considered and which brands do not. This is not a 2030 problem. If I had to guess it's probably not even a 2028 problem. AJ said this pretty clearly. We ahead him just off as crystal ball. He told me that this black Friday will probably be the first black Friday for agentic commerce could affect your revenue numbers. Maybe it's just 1%, maybe it's 5%, but it's there and it'll probably be noticeable. There's more building in the background too. The Google GEO got dropped recently and I've had a lot of thoughts on it. I recorded a podcast episode and I mentioned it and the Thursday update from last week. I've talked about this only. It was specifically the thing I've been thinking about the most is that the narrative that GEO is somehow in competition with SEO, that is not it. It's not it. GEO has never been about replacing SEO. If you look at it from where I'm sitting, this is more about getting ready for exactly the kind of infrastructure Google announced last week. John Mueller, the Google guy even said it recently too on X. He said websites need to do more than just be a landing spot after discovery. They need to be readable, trustworthy and useful to systems doing the discovery. Google CEO has also been saying it on repeat. Agents are the future. The LL, let me try again. The LLMS.TXT file discussion, the UPC rollout, the information agents launch. These are all pointing in the same direction. AJ has been watching this longer than most. He's been in it since GPT2, which was forever ago. It feels like at this point. I'm bringing him back from part two today, which is really 430, because the conversation is one that you need right now. Let's get into it. Okay, I want to talk about the agent to come or so because I think I'm like it took about that way. And he said something that just got me into that one. So, Adi Asmani is at IMAZEC. I hope I'm saying his name correctly. Had the agentic commerce, optimization, framework that he released last week. And he's calling that AEO. Have you looked into that one yet or no? Yeah, it's funny because that's that had been sort of adopted in the new wave SEO community as answer engine optimization. So there's a little bit of an inside joke there. But yeah, that's it's a hot topic right now. A lot of folks are trying to prepare, no one wants to be left behind. And I think it depends on what type and size of brand that you are. How much you should lean in now. So I think the first thing is like people don't really understand what agentic commerce is. Okay, so explain it to us like for five. Okay, yeah, like a golden retriever. Yeah, golden retriever. Yeah. So the main thing is the prerequisite for all of this is visibility. So visibility is the prerequisite. Agentic commerce is what happens after visibility. So can AI systems find your content and surface it? That's visibility. Can AI agents then compare, evaluate, eventually purchase on behalf of the consumer? That's agentic commerce. So there's a it's a two-parter. It's kind of a you know, if an agent can't find you, they can't recommend you. So you have to think about it in two parts. A lot of folks, especially smaller brands, I want them to focus on visibility today because the same thing. You're not visible. You can't you can't have agentic commerce. So focus there. If you're a larger brand or a midsize brand, you definitely need to be thinking about this black Friday will be the first black Friday where you have the possibility of agentic commerce affecting my numbers. Maybe it's maybe it's 5% of your numbers, but it's going to affect your numbers if you're a bigger player and you need to be be ready. So it's it's on the mind of everybody right now that I talk to. Honestly, I can't get out of any kind of consultative consultive conversation with any size brand without agentic commerce coming up. So I think I've been very much on the fence about this. Like I elbow deep in all the looking at agentic commerce and my thoughts have been I think this will be a while out and I don't really know why I thought that, but I've been deep into co-work lately with Claude having it to wallet these tasks and all these skills and I'm sitting here and I'm watching it and I'm like oh oh now agentic commerce makes sense from the user side because we have myself going through I can't do the same for me. Like I think it's coming how soon do you think? Like you said, you just said black Friday, but do you think it's going to be user adoption quicker than that? Quick word before we get back to that conversation, feel less into this and you're thinking oh man, I really need someone to help lead this for me. That's what I do. I'm an AI search optimization expert and a fractional content strategy for startups and enterprise brands. I build content programs that can extract you with execution and actually account. for how AI Search is reshaping visibility right now. This is not a 2016 SEO playbook with a fresh code of paint. This is fresh for 2026 and where user search behavior is headed. This sounds like the kind of helping that you're looking for the fastest way to reach me is to just email me directly. I'm at [email protected]. That's C-A-S-S-I-E at CassieClarkeMarketing.com. Send me a note, tell me what you're working on and we'll go from there. Okay, back to the episode. Um, you know, we had talked about this in the earlier segment about I'll see it here again. I think that the demand is already there. Everybody wants it. Everybody will use it. The technology just isn't there. So, OpenAI tried to launch this, you know, say I'm going to miss the timing, but say six months ago, right? Like they had made a big announcement and just kind of didn't do anything. I, we talked to all the brands. Everybody was hyped. Everybody wanted it. It just, it just wasn't there and it's because it's complicated. So, all those feeds, products, is it in stock, out of stock, pricing, pricing sometimes changes by the minute on some of these marketplaces. Like, it's a hallucination, you think it hallucinates now, right? It's a nightmare of logistics. Even just little things like OpenAI struggled with like state tax, right? Like just stuff that it wasn't thinking about that it had to get. Here's the thing. They're going to solve it. The, the, it's like the consumer demands that they solve it. They will solve it. Um, I still think we're a little further out. Um, like I said, I, most, so I won't give it away. Anybody's numbers, but nobody had, I've talked to and I'm talking to some of the biggest companies in the world. No one has ever told me that the, the revenue they get from AI is over 5%. No one. It's usually less than 1%. Right? And so we're there. But the demand is just like massive. It's just waiting like, like I said earlier, a flood is coming. And so what you don't want to do is do nothing and then get hit by the tsunami, right? Right. Um, but at the same time, it might be 1 to 5% of your revenue this Black Friday. You, you can't go all in and then ignore the 95, right? And so you're, you're unfortunately in a little bit of why, why joke when you said that, you should be straddling the fence. That is the proper position to be. Um, anybody who's in one camp, I do nothing or I'm all in. We only care about agent of commerce is wrong. Um, yeah. So I think about it in terms of, of the user themselves, I've been saying for months. I don't think that chat GPT or AI surge is going to be a thing for the older generation. I'm thinking about my dad who watching him use an iPhone as an experience. I mean, the main camp had a contact into his phone. But he tells me he really loves AI overviews. So I think like the demand absolutely is there is just, the technology is not, which is interesting. Um, but there's this staff loading round that AI agents could mediate three to five trillion dollars in consumer commerce by 2030. If even half of that is right, what, I mean, good floor to have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. What does the brands organization chart need to look at to serve both humans and these agents as customers? So you've stumbled into my, my favorite topic, which is it's, it's the mindset that your organization has to adopt AI. If you're, if you're a commercial retailer, AI is not a technology you serve. It's a customer you serve. And while that sounds like simple, what, like, it's everything. It's a customer, not a technology. And so I, I, I would go as far as doing persona research on AI. I would literally, I'd have my, you know, it's like, here is, you know, sassy Sarah and she does, right? Right. You have all the, all the little workups like, where's your chat, GPT one? Where's your, where's cloud? Right. Where does cloud, I don't want to add the more, is it cloud a he or she? I don't know. But where does cloud get its facts? What format does cloud like to receive the information in? What accessibility issues does cloud have that it can access access what types of job is script? Right. How does, when presented with five things that could be true reason over the truth? These are things that we've been doing for a hundred years for people, right? But we're not doing it for AI. So the, my point is if AI is summarizing your website for her and then doing the research and the clicking so she doesn't have to so that she buys the pair of sneakers, isn't then AI acting as either a bridge or a barrier between you or her? Isn't it then your customer? And that's, that's where to me, I see sometimes either a light go on or off or people are like, that's BS or like, the light goes on and they're like, wait a minute, I actually have been just thinking about it like tech and I'm going, no, it's the customer. It's your maker break customers, your ultimate customer, because it's the decider. If it deems you unworthy, you never show up in her summary. You never want of the options that she should pursue. And right now you can get away with it. But once it gets so personalized and she trust it more than she trusts you, you cannot be out of the equation because she'll trust that it's right and you're wrong. So that as personalization rightly or wrongly gets better, people will get addicted rightly or wrongly to that personalization of AI that knows them so, so well. And once they do that, you'll see the trust capital switch from the retailer to the AI, the my AI that I believe in trust. And so it becomes absolutely your customer and it deems you worthy or unworthy each time. So you've got to think about it that way. I know I got way up on the soap box there, but that's, I'm passionate about that because I believe it, I just believe it to be true. And once you think about it, it sort of becomes obvious, but I don't see a lot of people adopting that mindset. So I like to think about these AI engines as a trusted grandma. Like they're not gonna, yeah, they're not going to give you a recommendation of something that they know you're not going to like, like your grandma is not going to do you, but when you think about it in terms of being a buyer, that makes a lot of sense that you have to think about them, okay, now they're an actual customer. They're not just a recommendation layer that are all so doing the buying. Exactly, they're doing the buying. And so yeah, especially when they connect that last mile and they're not just recommending, but they're actually hitting add to cart, check out, shipping, then yeah, how's that not your customer? I mean, it's absolutely your customer. And so yeah, thinking about it that way and that changes the things, maybe you should be serving the way you organize your reviews for AI because if you're doing the research and seeing how it parses different review sets, maybe you're surfacing different ones to that, just like you would for a customer. It's like, what is our call to action that she's resonating with? Aren't you testing CTAs all the time? Of course you are. Are you testing anything right now for AI agents? The answer is usually no. You should be, right, because they're your new customer type and eventually I believe they'll be the dominant customer type for everyone. And they're all different too. I think that's important to keep behind. No. Tatt and GPD acts a little bit differently than the Gemini and the overviews also act differently than Gemini. Like that part drives me nuts. Yes. Do we also need to think about this though in terms of, okay, we have the AI agent, so Tatt and GPD, Claude or whatever. Do we have to think about their persona in terms of, okay, well, here's our audience personas and they're using these agents. So now we have to think about how that affects those personas or we just, here's how Tatt, GPD works, here's how Claude works. Does that question make sense? Yeah, I think so. It's like old days of SEO. Like we had Yahoo, we had Google and you sort of like optimize different being like different ways, you know, like each had its own preferences and rules. So I would say this, look, that, you know, we talked to earlier about, you know, 10 problems and that's the 11th, like that might be the 12th, because I would love for a brand to be so locked in that they're optimizing for perplexity and Claude and like making tweaks, but the reality is they just don't have enough time in the day. And so I would at least start with just what would AI in general look like as a customer? Where am I getting most of my traffic? Pull up, have IT, pull up your wall, look where you're getting it. I can already plot twist, I can already tell you it's mostly going to be from Gemini and Chattu Bt. So Chattu Bt is going to take me like 60, 70%, then you're going to get Gemini traffic from AI overviews and and Gemini itself and then a small small but important set depending on who you are from knowledge workers using O-Work, like you're saying you're using. So that's what you're gonna see. And so yeah, just optimized for agent commerce, accessibility answering with intent. So like right now, let's say you were selling strollers, I use this as an example a lot. Your attributes that you may be telling the agent or customers like, hey, this is a stroller, it comes in black, has two cup holders, the wheels are 14 inches or whatever it is, right? Like, might be pretty big wheels, I don't know. I don't know, stroller wheels. But the point is it's very like attribute focused. Well, what about intent focused? Can the stroller fold up easily on a subway? Can this, can I take it on a flight? Can it go over gravel at the park? That's intent based. An agent's think on behalf of their user. They know that she just had a toddler and they know that they go to the park and they know, it knows, right? And so thinking about, I wouldn't necessarily be like, okay, I'm gonna write it this way for Claude and then I'm gonna write it this way for perplexed. But even just thinking what we just talked about, just going how could I take all of my stroller content and make it much more intent based? So that AI that reasons can reason over these intents. Any brand that does that will be light years ahead of most who are still in this like cookie cutter attribute world, get to an intent world. You have to be very specific with your use cases and everything that it covers, I think when it comes to this, which kind of blends into how we do content strategy now. Like are we creating the content that speaks directly to this thing? Right. Yes, yeah, yeah, specificity. Specificity is huge. Instead of just saying, here's some kitchen tips for 2025 or 2026, you're like, this is why I chose this specific countertop because I have kids that spill on it. It's go specific. And if your product is good for people with this type of, hey, it's good for people with bad knees. That's what you talk about. That's what's going to make you unique. That's what's not optimizing for search bots. You're optimizing for bots that can reason. And that's why you have to think of them like a customer. They're reasoning on behalf of the customer. So that goes back to you have to be visible. Being visible means you have to be specific and talk about for use cases all the time. And then you have to be ready for the agente layer. So are anything like a final tip of a brand or anyone thinking, okay, well, how do I be ready for the agente layer? Anything that they should be doing now before this really becomes mainstream? Yeah, so I would just set it into two parts. If you are a smaller brand and you're on, I'm just going to use big generic. You're smaller brand, you're on Shopify. Let Shopify handle the super agente commerce protocol layer. They trust me. They're on it. But what you can do is all the visibility side, the intent, changing the way you communicate. You also can do the things that we talked about, like checking accessibility, can the agent show up and see my Shopify content? All that's on you, right? You can check that easily. Is everything hidden behind JavaScript carousels and it goes away when AI shows up? That's on you. You should fix that. What's on Shopify is the backend, backend, can it literally add to cart, can it check out and understand taxes and all of that? You shouldn't worry about that. Now, if you're a big box retailer, you absolutely should be worrying about that. If you're not having conversations right now about Google's universal commerce protocol, UCP, you're not having the right conversations. You must be having those types of conversations if you're a bigger box retailer, if you're a larger company. Smaller companies, like I said, control what you can control. Don't try to borrow the ocean. Let Shopify do the last mile. You do all the intent, visibility, accessibility, and you'll be in a good spot for the future. - Okay, that is part two with AJ. And I want to leave you with the one shift that will actually matter in the next six-ish months. We need to stop thinking about AI as a technology that you serve. Start thinking about as a customer that you serve. That's AJ's framing and I really think is the right one. The AI agents that are doing research on behalf of your buyer isn't a bot to game. It's a decision maker. It's reasoning over your content, comparing you against your competitors, and deciding whether you're worth recommending. Exactly the way a trusted friend would. So here is the practical question to take into this week when you start thinking about all of this. Question is, is your content written for how a customer thinks or how a search bot indexes? Because those are two very different things. We're talking attributes versus intent. For example, a search of 14-inch wheels versus, can this stroller handle the subway in the park? Are two very different things. Agents are reasoning. They're looking for the second answer, not so much the first one. If you're a smaller brand on Shopify, a day was pretty clear about this. Let Shopify handle the back-end commerce protocol error. They are already on top of it. I promise you, they are on top of it. What's on you, though, is invisibility, intent, and accessibility. So go ahead and check whether your key content disappears when JavaScript is off. Read right your product and service pages around what your customers actually trying to do, not just what you're offering. If you're a larger brand and you're not having conversations right now about Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, that was announced last week. Actually, it was an I-ounce a while ago, but kind of real quick focus last week at I/O. You need to be. I know I sound like Noah from the Bible, if you know, you know. That the flood is coming. It is not here at full force yet, but the demand is built up. The technology is catching up, and the brands that are visible, specific, and intent-focused when it arrives, are the ones that are going to win. They're gonna be set in pretty. Part three, what you're gonna do is part two with AJ is coming next week, and we're getting to AI governance, which I know sounds a little dry, but I promise you it's not. This is a piece that determines whether any of this actually holds up long term. Episode links and resources are in the show notes. Until then, stay visible. (upbeat music)