Agent-mediated discovery
AI agents begin handling discovery and purchasing. Optimizing for agent interpretation becomes its own discipline.
When an agent does the browsing, the human never sees the SERP. What matters is whether the agent's retrieval loop selects, trusts, and quotes your source.
The human leaves the loop
In agent-mediated discovery, the agent visits pages on behalf of the user. The visual layer becomes secondary. What matters is what the agent can extract, verify, and act on.
Sites that are readable to machines — schema-rich, stable identifiers, machine-readable claims — become preferentially selected.
The direction is not speculative
The engineering is already in production; the consumer behavior is what has to catch up. When it does, the sites that prepared for machine-first retrieval will have a compounding advantage.