Constant
Bots don’t need CSS or hero images. There is no downside to cloaking your site for LLM crawlers, so there is a chance that websites show bots a barebones version.
A skill set that remains constant in this future is technical SEO: crawlability, (server) speed, internal linking, and structured data.
Change
An agentic open web offers much better ad targeting capabilities since bots know their owners inside out.
Humans will make purchase decisions a lot faster since their agents give them all the information they need and know their preferences.
Advertising costs drop significantly and offer even higher returns than already today.
Since bots can translate anything in seconds, localization and international sales are no longer a problem. Humans can buy from anyone, anywhere – only constraints by shipping and inventory. The global economy opens up even further.
If we play it right, agents could be the ultimate safe-keepers of privacy: No one has as much data about you as they do, but you can control how much they share.
Agents know you but don’t need to share that information with others. We might share even more data with them, spinning the value flywheel of data → understanding → results → data → value → results → etc.
On the downside, we need to build defenses against rogue bots by redefining what bots are allowed to do in a robots.txt 2.0-like format. Cybersecurity has become even more important, but also more complex since bad bots can mimic good ones so much better.
We’ll need to figure out the environmental impact of more energy consumption by higher bot traffic.
Hopefully, bots will be more efficient and, therefore, cause less total web traffic than humans. This would at least somewhat offset the energy gorge LLMs are already causing.
Important
The most bot-friendly format of information is raw and structured: XML, RSS, and API feeds. We have already sent product feeds and XML sitemaps to Google, but agents will want more.
Web design will be less important in the future, and maybe that’s okay since most sites look very similar anyway.
Feed design becomes more important: what information to include in feeds, how much, how often to update it, and what requests to send back to bots.
Marketers will spend a lot more time reverse-engineering what conversations with chatbots look like. Bots will likely be a black box like Google’s algorithm, but advertising could bring light into what people ask the most.
Relationships
In the agentic future, it’s hard to get customers to switch once customers have settled on a brand they like until they have a bad experience.
As a result, an important marketing lever will be getting customers to try your brand with campaigns like discounts and exclusive offers.
Once you have conviction and signal that your product is better, the quest becomes persuading users to try it out. Obviously, that already works today.
With so many opportunities to advertise and sway users towards a specific product organically before they buy, we have a lot more influence on the purchase.
But, in the future, agents could make those choices for users. Marketers will spend more time on relationship building, building brand awareness, and influencing old-school marketing factors like pricing, distribution (shipping), and differentiation.
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Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal