Marketing to buy-bots: How to coax and convert AI agents

Until now, conversion optimization has been focused on user experience – human users.

But buy-bots are coming. Not Alexa, not Siri, but autonomous shopping agents deployed by humans to execute shopping tasks on their own.

This isn’t sci-fi fantasy – Google, Visa, Amazon and Walmart are all investing in agentic shopping capabilities (not to mention OpenAI), and we can expect consumer apps to pop up very soon.

How does this change the “rules” for revenue generation when your site traffic is a mix of people and their agentic proxies?

Forget the “rules” of copywriting and persuasion

Marketing to buy bots means moving from emotion to logic.

Bots are not impressed by visual appeal, psychological triggers, urgency cues, storytelling and influencer unboxings. Spending hours on the perfect headline, subject line or opening hook won’t sway the agents.

Bots don’t feel FOMO. They’re not seduced by lifestyle imagery. They don’t care about seasonal vibes or what’s above the fold on mobile PDPs. (Yay!?)

They care about structured data.

That means in this agent-centric future:

• Emotional hooks make way for machine-readable value matrices
• Brand voice still matters, but only if it can be translated into trust scores and ethical alignment models
• Meta-optimization isn’t about hitting KPIs, it’s about becoming the first choice of someone’s personal GPT-powered shopping companion

Selling to Dr. Spock

Let’s imagine the scenario:

Sasha’s agent, named “Rue,” has been told:

• Stay under $150
• Prioritize vegan materials
• Only buy from brands with >85% positive sentiment online
• Match Sasha’s recent Pinterest board

The bot bypasses your slick landing page with lifestyle images and 20% off banner. Instead, Rue slurps your structured product feed, reviews your return policy and cross-checks against five price-match APIs.

Marketing to Rue means your PDPs need:

• Consistent JSON-LD markup
• Explicitly defined ethical claims (with links to verifiable sources)
• Transparent pricing logic and supply chain summaries
• API-accessible product specs

SEO for the agentic age

Traditional SEO is changing fast – it’s becoming GEO (generative engine optimization). AI won’t even need to use Google as an intermediary. LLMs can scrape their own data just fine, so you’ll want to get your products into these agent services directly.

Instead of asking, “What’s my rank on Google for ‘best white sneakers’?” you’ll ask:

• “How does my product stack in GPT’s ranked result when prompted: Find me breathable, ethically made white sneakers under $120 with great arch support?”
• “Do Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude favor my product feed structure?”
• “Are my images vectorized, labeled, and retrievable via multimodal queries?”

The canonical feed is the new storefront.

Conversational commerce rewired

SMS and email once offered a personal touch: “Hey you, new styles just dropped 😍” — but agents don't click because they’re flattered, and they don’t have reptilian responses to color and shapes.

Instead, agents parse signals:

• Is the brand’s SMS schema well-structured?
• Can this message be converted into machine actions like “add to wishlist” or “fetch size compatibility”?

Even conversational AI (chatbots and customer service) will get a makeover. You’re no longer managing a support queue for a frustrated human, it’s a tiered logic tree inside someone’s private assistant.

The new gold standard in chat? A backend endpoint labeled: GET /fit-recommendations?footShape=narrow&arch=high.

Brand loyalty in an agentic world

Will agents care about brand affinity?

Only if their users do.

This means your emotional brand work doesn’t disappear, but it does move upstream. You must market not only to buyers, but also to the prompts they write. Your goal is to become:

• “My go-to for minimal, durable bags”
• “The brand that always gets my sizing right”
• “Where I send gifts when I want to impress”

Because the prompt is the shelf.

So What Should You Do Today?

1. Clean your product feed — like, really clean it. Missing fields and messy attributes are death in an agentic world.
2. Start structuring your content for LLM parsing — blog posts, lookbooks, even customer reviews. Make sure the meaning is legible to machines.
3. Reimagine loyalty — don’t just earn it from the human. Program it into the agent’s logic.
4. Create agent endpoints — instead of just customer service channels, offer a public-facing API that agentic shoppers can query directly.
5. Test your site with AI agents — literally prompt GPT to shop your category. What does it choose? Why?

As ecommerce marketers and product managers, we’ve seen the eras: the search engine. Mobile. Social. Now shopping agents.

What portion of traffic and transactions is taken by buy-bots is yet to be seen, but it pays to be prepared.