Highways and Side Streets

Photo by Florian Steciuk on Unsplash

Generative AI is adding a new reader to B2B marketing sites: AI agents. This used to be a human-only journey. Now there are two audiences: AI agents and humans (in this order), which changes how businesses create and manage their online presence.

Dual content streams: highways and side streets

Imagine your marketing strategy as an information transportation network. Traditionally, marketers design go-to-market motions to act as a highway, guiding human prospects (Inquiries and Marketing Qualified Leads) through a carefully crafted journey from awareness to conversion (and renewal). However, a new content layer has emerged with AI: side streets tailored explicitly for AI agents.

Highways for Human Users: These are the primary customer journeys through which real people interact with your content. Here, the focus is on creating engaging, informative, and persuasive experiences that address your prospects' pain points and educate them on how your solutions serve as effective painkillers.

Side Streets for AI Agents: These are new, specialized content journeys designed to train AI agents with the information they need to index and present your content to users through chat-based interfaces (like Perplexity and ChatGPT) and AI search summaries. This content is optimized for both SEO and AI agent optimization (AIAO, as coined by May Habib), ensuring that AI tools can accurately interpret and utilize your content.

The role of generative AI in content consumption

Gen AI is transforming how content is delivered and consumed. As highlighted by May Habib, Google's shift towards AI search summaries will significantly impact B2B marketing sites. This evolution means that content strategies must now account for AI agents that browse the web on users' behalf, making optimizing content for these digital intermediaries crucial.

Implications for B2B Marketing Sites:

1. Reduced Clicks, Increased Engagement: We expect AI search summaries to result in fewer direct clicks to marketing sites. Instead, AI agents will extract and present relevant information directly within search results or chat interfaces. This shift necessitates ensuring that even brief interactions with your content via AI are impactful and drive engagement.

   1. Hypothesis: fewer clicks can still mean more business. If AI summaries reduce low-intent traffic and increase self-qualified conversations, marketing sites can drive the same or more business opportunities with less volume, which can push CAC down and improve the CAC:LTV ratio for businesses that get this right.

2. Content for AI Training: Content will increasingly serve as training data for large language models (LLMs). This requires a strategic approach to ensure your content is structured and rich enough to train AI effectively, emphasizing key messages and unique value propositions.

   1. AI still requires human supervision to ensure the final output meets business standards. AI is not replacing content creators, but content creators will become more efficient, resulting in smaller content teams operating as AI content editors.

3. Optimized for AI Agents: Marketing sites must create sections specifically optimized for AI agents. This shift involves implementing structured data, schema markup, and new techniques to make content easily accessible and understandable for AI. 

   1. I envision this to be informed by what we have learned from sitemaps and RSS feeds.

Strategies for adapting to AI-driven changes

1. Embrace AI Agent Optimization (AIAO): Traditional SEO practices will evolve to include AIAO, focusing on optimizing content for AI agents. This new practice includes using structured data, natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and ensuring content is contextually rich and semantically relevant.

2. Develop Dual Content Streams:

   • Highways (for Humans): Create compelling, narrative-driven content that addresses user pain points, highlights your solutions, and builds brand affinity.

   • Side Streets (for AI Agents): Develop technical, structured content designed to feed AI agents. This content should be concise, factual, and optimized for machine reading.

3. Value User-Generated Content: Encourage users to create and share content like reviews, tutorials, and use cases. UGC enhances engagement and authenticity and provides authentic data for AI agents to index and utilize.

   1. Side note: Authenticity has become the new time. Due to Gen AI, we not only live in a society with a constant time deficit but also an authenticity deficit.

4. Re-engage Social Channels: Use social media to bridge the gap between AI and human interaction. Social platforms will become increasingly essential touchpoints for human users, complementing AI-driven content consumption.

5. Focus on Brand as Demand: Double down on brand-building efforts to create demand. Strong branding (beyond logos and colours, focusing on how your brand makes consumers feel and what it promises) will ensure your business remains relevant in a world of AI-driven content consumption.

Future-proofing your marketing strategy

As the digital landscape evolves with AI, B2B businesses can adopt a dual approach: highways for humans, side streets for AI agents.

Start with a small loop: pick 10 revenue-critical pages, add a concise machine-readable block plus schema/structured data, then review in two weeks (do you show up in AI summaries more often, does inbound conversion change, and does inbound arrive more self-qualified).