RIP Digital Marketing To Humans 

By Tara Corey

The internet’s power users are no longer human.

AI agents are making decisions that used to belong to people. Agents read reviews, compare prices, book flights, reorder groceries and subscribe to services. They operate without commands constraining other AI tech like voice assistants or chatbots.

The implications are massive for digital marketing. Metrics are becoming misleading. Customer acquisition is no longer a game of clicks. Agents make purchasing decisions without searching or clicking at all. They bypass SEO tactics completely.

Here are a few things brands and marketers need to grasp.

Agents don’t browse — they act

AI agents don’t doom scroll — they have a mission. Agents don’t watch brand videos, browse customer testimonials or benefit from thoughtful UX design. They hunt for structured data — pricing, specs, service tiers — and make rapid, algorithmic decisions. If your content isn’t designed to be legible to agents, it’s literally invisible to the web’s most powerful visitors.

Of course, most websites aren’t currently built for this. What looks great to a human — vibrant images, snappy copy, dynamic layouts — often reads as a garbled mess to agents. Agents don’t explore, they extract. And if your content isn’t crystal clear and easy for a machine to read, they’ll skip right past it.

Marketers need to ensure that web content is presented in a format an agent can parse and evaluate, or it won’t be considered. Period.

SEO’s relevance is waning

Traditional SEO is crafted to encourage humans to move from Google to your page. But agents often bypass search engines to extract answers directly from search results, summaries, structured databases or APIs. Your website’s layout matters less than detail when it’s the agent that decides what’s relevant and important without ever needing to click through and visit the page. Content (tailored to AI agents/LLMs) is becoming more important than validation (designed to convert humans to customers).

Consequently, brand visibility strategies must shift for the benefit of both audiences: people and AI agents. Keywords, citations and backlinks are important, but they can’t be the entire approach — marketers need to make sure their data is easy for agents to find, organized in a way agents understand, and available wherever agents are looking.

In a world where the agent avoids search channels completely to access legible product data, content must be deployed for machines first.

Website analytics no longer drive progress

Marketers still measure bounce rates, time on page and session length. But agents play by different rules. Legacy metrics are misleading because agents may appear as bot traffic or not register at all. While your analytic platform may reveal a significant web traffic slowdown, it’s more likely missing high-value interactions happening at blinding speed with little to no digital footprint.

It’s time for marketers to throw out the old playbook and embrace analytics that measure impact, not just visits. Important questions to raise: Are agents recommending your product? Are they choosing your service over a competitor’s? Are they finding your pricing data and specs — or skipping you entirely? Are agents showing up as bots — or at all — on traditional web analytics?

Market to agents — or else

Brand storytelling still matters, but only after marketers have ensured agents can actually find and process offers. If digital marketing remains aimed at humans, marketers risk losing a lot more than site visits and time spent on pages.

Tara Corey is senior vice president of marketing at Optimizely, where she leads global marketing strategy and execution. Tara joined in January 2025 after serving as SVP of marketing at Ellucian, with previous leadership roles at Qlik and SAP.

Illustration: Dom Guzman