Marketing to Agents: How AI Agents Will Choose What Your Customers Buy

A trusted endorsement on a product page moves a human shopper’s choice by 4 to 10 points. For an AI shopping agent, the same line can move it by more than 90. That finding comes from MIT research, and it’s one sign that marketing is shifting again. Personal agents like Muse and Instinct don’t just answer questions. They research, compare and buy for your customer. Walmart has now opened its doors to them. So the question has moved. It used to be “what keywords do I rank for?” Then it was “does AI mention my brand?” Now it’s “when an agent shops for my customer, will it pick me?” 🎯 In this webinar, Gumshoe co-founder and CEO Todd Sawicki and lead research engineer Nick Clark (PhD candidate at the University of Washington Information School) walk through what the research says about how agents choose. They also cover what brand-to-agent (B2A) marketing looks like in practice. What you’ll learn: • Why an agent acts as a digital twin of your customer, and picks products the way a recommender system does • What papers from Meta, MIT and Stanford found about how agents shop (in Meta’s study, giving an agent memory of the user raised shopping success from 27% to 70%) • Why agents read everything, and what that means for how much detail your content needs • Why YouTube is the most-cited domain in Gumshoe’s data, even though a video’s views and likes don’t predict whether it gets cited • How personas stand in for agents, including a Lululemon example where the brand got picked anywhere from 10% to 84% of the time depending on the persona • A five-step B2A playbook: awareness, evaluation, content, technical readability and citations Chapters 0:00 Intro 4:02 Personal agents are here 6:12 Walmart opens to shopping agents 10:16 Chat answers, agents act 15:00 From search to AEO 2.0 16:06 How an agent picks a product 20:02 The research: Meta, MIT and Stanford 28:14 Do agents care about images? 29:03 Why YouTube gets cited 35:30 Personas as a proxy for agents 39:24 Example: Lululemon across 8 personas 42:04 What B2A marketing means 45:10 Gumshoe’s content audit agent 48:26 The five-step B2A playbook 50:46 Q&A: Does this apply to B2B? 51:59 Q&A: Are agents easier to persuade than people? 54:19 Q&A: Keeping up as models change 57:31 Q&A: US vs. Europe Run your free AI visibility audit: https://gumshoe.ai Questions? Email todd@gumshoe.ai Nick’s research on what gets a YouTube video cited in AI Overviews: https://gumshoe.ai/resources/whitepap... #AIAgents #AgenticCommerce #B2A #AEO #GEO #Marketing