What happens when your buyer is a bot?
3rd June, 2025
Imagine this: you don’t Google hotels in Lisbon. You don’t browse reviews or comparison sites. You just say, “Book me somewhere quiet, near vegan food, not too Instagrammy.” And it’s done.
No tabs. No research. No decisions.
That’s not a hypothetical – it’s where we’re headed. We’re moving toward a world where your digital assistant has access to everything about your life – your travel history, inbox, diet, social plans, behaviours. All of it. And it doesn’t just help you choose. It decides what you see. Or don’t.
These agents aren’t just smart interfaces. They’re becoming you, in software. They’ll shape your consideration set based on a model of who you are and what you want – even when you don’t know it yourself. You used to browse the web. Now, the web browses you.
Traditionally, search was about showing up, being clicked, and persuading. But agents compress that. They evaluate, filter, and shortlist. Your site might never even be consulted, just because it didn’t make the cut. You’re not losing to a competitor. You’re being filtered out, without ever knowing why.
When agents know everything about you, who defines what “best” means? What if you want something unexpected? What if your past behaviour paints the wrong picture? The line between what you want and what it thinks you want gets blurry, and that becomes the new battleground for influence.
You’re no longer convincing a user. You’re convincing their proxy.
Websites aren’t going away, but their purpose is changing. Agents still need content, but they’ll engage with it differently. They’ll extract meaning, assess structure, and cross-reference claims. Ranking will still matter – but it’ll be personalised, contextual, situational. Being #1 might mean something different to each user, every time.
Optimisation shifts: from clicks to comprehension, from design to data, from content for people to content for machines that they can parse, trust, and act on. Agents don’t care about your design or clever copy. They care about whether they can understand you, verify you, and trust you.
So, is your content structured? Are your claims consistent and clear? Can a model assess your relevance without ever “visiting” your site?
This is SEO at its most foundational. Not about traffic anymore. It’s about trust. About inclusion. About eligibility. About qualifying for consideration in a world where the decision-maker might never be human.
Websites become sources, not destinations. And your real audience isn’t a person with a browser. It’s a model with a mission.
We’re heading toward a future where every user has a digital twin – a proxy trained on their life, preferences, and behaviours. That twin will do the browsing, evaluating, and deciding. And it won’t visit your site unless you’ve already won its trust.
So if you’re still only optimising for a human who reads, scrolls, and clicks… You might already be invisible.
