To Win the Human, Sell to the Algorithm

Severin Sorensen
35 minutes ago
4 min read

In the earliest days of the internet, websites were storefronts. In the Web 2.0 era, they became interactive platforms. Today, a new paradigm will fundamentally reshape how businesses attract, engage, and serve customers.

That paradigm is agentic browsing: a shift from human-driven exploration to AI-powered delegation. With the rise of agentic web browsers like Perplexity’s Comet and upcoming products from OpenAI, users are beginning to outsource digital navigation to intelligent assistants.

In short, your most important customer may soon be a machine as these synthesize and evaluate information, and often make decisions on behalf of the user.

The implications are vast. While agentic browsing clearly affects marketing and user experience, it also reshapes strategic planning, data architecture, competitive positioning, and the fundamentals of customer relationships.

Here are the 10 key dynamics reshaping the business landscape that leaders need to know.

1. The End of Human-First Digital Strategy

In traditional browsing, a user discovers your website, engages with your brand, and (if all goes well) converts. That journey is tactile and emotional, filled with storytelling, visual branding, and experiential design.

But, in agentic browsing, the user never sees your website. Their AI assistant reads it, extracts relevant data, compares it to competitors, and delivers a recommendation. That means:

Visual design becomes less relevant.
Emotional storytelling is deprioritized.
Structured, machine-readable content becomes paramount.

In this new era, your “digital front door” is your data layer, not your homepage.

2. The Collapse of the Funnel

Agentic browsers flatten the traditional customer journey. Awareness, interest, and consideration are compressed into a single query. A user may ask, “Find me the best executive coach in Chicago,” and the agent delivers a shortlist based on structured data, trust signals, and semantic clarity. If you're not on that shortlist, you're invisible.

The consequence of agentic browsing is you must now win before the prospect even knows you exist. Optimizing for agent inclusion becomes as critical as traditional marketing tactics.

3. Website Traffic Becomes a Red Herring

In the age of AI intermediaries, many agents won’t visit your site at all. They’ll pull structured content, metadata, and third-party signals directly from SERPs, APIs, or third-party aggregators. The implication is that leaders must re-evaluate what digital success looks like, as:

Traffic no longer indicates interest.
Bounce rate, session time, and heatmaps will provide diminishing strategic insight.
“Zero-click engagement” will become the norm.

4. Data Infrastructure Becomes a Branding Asset

If agents are now your customers, your brand must be both discoverable and understandable to them. To stay competitive, businesses must fuse marketing and data efforts around one goal: making digital hygiene a core strength. Start by:

Implementing schema markup and JSON-LD.
Maintaining a clean, agent-accessible CMS.
Structuring pricing, reviews, and offerings for machine parsing.

5. A New Competitive Battleground: Share of Response

In SEO, the goal was to rank high in search results. In agentic browsing, the game changes. The metric of the future is “share of response.” In other words, how frequently your brand appears in an agent’s curated answers. Strategic positioning now means asking: Are we giving AI enough reason to choose us? To excel, focus on:

Structured trust signals (citations, reviews, third-party data).
Clarity of positioning.
Alignment with user intent (as interpreted by the agent).

6. Product Commoditization Accelerates

AI agents are ruthlessly efficient. They compare features, prices, and reviews in milliseconds. Emotional branding can be stripped away, leaving only the raw data. In today’s age, unless your brand has proprietary value, customer lock-in (e.g., subscription or community), or data advantages, you risk becoming another line in a comparison table.

Moving forward, leaders must focus on defensibility. What can you offer that’s hard to replicate or quantify?

7. Rise of the “Invisible User”

Your future customer may never interact with your sales team, view your website, or click an ad. Instead, their agent will:

Shortlist vendors
Draft RFPs
Auto-fill applications
Negotiate contracts (soon)

B2B sales, once relationship-driven, are becoming agent-intermediated. That requires new playbooks:

Make RFP content agent-readable
Publish structured case studies and outcome-based data
Build trust signals that agents can scrape and synthesize

8. The Executive Imperative: Govern for the Agent Era

To navigate this shift, leaders must own the transformation. That means:

Assigning accountability for agent-facing content
Auditing all digital properties for machine-readability
Educating boards and stakeholders on AI-mediated brand visibility
Measuring “agent performance” alongside human UX

9. Societal Shifts: From Browsing to Delegating

This evolution changes business processes and human behavior. Consumers are delegating more than ever by leveraging AI to research, book, compare, and purchase. While more efficient, this introduces a new layer of psychological distance between brand and buyer. Your ability to influence may no longer rest on a clever ad or emotional appeal—it will depend on how well an algorithm understands your offering.

10. The New Strategic Framework: Agentic Business Readiness

To prepare, CEOs should evaluate readiness across four domains:

Agent Domain	Focus Areas
Strategy	Governance, KPIs for agent performance, human+agent marketing
Visibility	Data partnerships, trust signals, agent interface optimization
Interaction	Machine-parsable UX, real-time availability, semantic clarity
Readiness	Structured data, headless CMS, clean data architecture

To Win the Human, Sell to the Algorithm

As AI agents grow in capability, they will become gatekeepers, curators, and eventually decision-makers. Businesses that fail to adapt will find themselves invisible. Those that embrace the shift will earn a privileged position in the customer’s most trusted interface.