Jurjen van den Broek
Director Organic Marketing at VML Netherlands
From Search to Sidekick: How AI Agents Are Reshaping Marketing
As AI moves from answering to acting, the traditional marketing model quietly breaks.
This article is not about AI search hype. It's about a structural shift in how commercial decisions are made.
Black Friday 2025 marked a clear inflection point for AI-driven commerce. According to figures cited by Forbes, supported by Adobe and Salesforce, AI shifted from experiment to structural force.
Three key figures we’ve seen changing the market are:
- Adobe reported that that AI-driven traffic to US retail websites was 805% higher than the year before.
- Salesforce observed $14.2 billion in global online revenue influenced by AI agents, with $3 billion in the US directly driven by them.
- Across Cyber Week, AI influenced $67 billion of the $336.6 billion in total global online sales about one-fifth of all digital spending.
In short: AI agents are now embedded in the buy button.
Yet many marketing organisations still operate on an outdated model:
search → compare → click. Dashboards, funnels and KPIs are built around that logic. But the customer journey is rapidly shifting to:
ask your assistant → it decides for you.
From Search to Sidekick
Generative AI assistants and answer engines, from ChatGPT to Gemini and from Google AI Overviews to Microsoft Copilot, increasingly sit between brands and customers.
They read websites, reviews and documentation, draw conclusions, and present a single answer or shortlist, often combined with recommendations, price tracking, and direct purchase links.
The biggest marketing shift since Google is therefore not AI search itself, but the relocation of decision-making — away from marketers and consumers and into AI agents, where brands have little direct control.
Decisions move from SERPs and marketplaces to AI interfaces, where answer, advice and transaction converge.
Visibility Is not the Problem, selection is
McKinsey’s State of Marketing Europe 2026 shows that 72% of European marketing leaders expect higher budgets in 2026, despite continued ROI pressure. The real question is not whether budgets grow, but how they are allocated:
Do you reinvest in paid channels, or build compounding organic assets; content, data, structure and reputation, that grow in value and power SEO, GEO, social, email and AI-driven answers?
Visibility alone no longer guarantees impact. Being selected does.
Answer Readiness
In the classic model, Google decides which links appear. In the new model, AI decides which sources are selected, summarized or ignored entirely. The entire journey, from orientation to purchase, can happen inside one AI answer, without a click.
Answer readiness is the ability of AI systems to recognize, verify and include your facts, expertise and credibility.
Three questions define it:
- Is your product information accurate, current, and structured?
- Are your claims supported by evidence humans and models understand?
- Are you present in the sources LLMs rely on?
If you cannot answer “yes”, you are not progressing — you are invisible.
Without answer readiness, there is no funnel left to optimize. SEO remains valuable, but the rules have changed.
From SEO to GEO
Brands that invested seriously in Organic Marketing and SEO do not need to start over. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is not a trick. It is the outcome of taking organic marketing seriously.
What changes:
- less focus on rankings, more on AI answers;
- growth of zero-click behaviour;
- declining relevance of CTR;
- stronger focus on ROI; Not measured in clicks or traffic, but in decision impact: being selected by AI systems, higher conversion value, reduced reliance on paid media, and structural value creation instead of campaign-based returns.
What does not change:
- deep user understanding;
- content only you can credibly create;
- clarity for humans and machines;
- trust over tactics.
AI Has No Feelings
This principle underpins everything.
AI has no feelings.
Brand value that exists only in campaigns or narratives does not register.
Only what is explicit, verifiable and machine-readable counts.
The Real Divide
Brands that treated Organic Marketing and SEO as a compounding discipline now transition naturally to GEO.
Those who treated SEO as a hygiene check, face a catch-up race in 2026, not because rankings collapse, but because they are not included in AI answers.
The first step is simple: measure the right KPIs, establish a reliable baseline, and know your true position. From there, execution follows.
You have two options: accelerate or disappear. And this is only the beginning.
The next phase is not AI advising, but AI deciding and acting. In a follow-up article, I will explore the next phase already forming on the horizon; when AI agents move from advising to acting, executing decisions end-to-end.
In the meantime, if you are looking for strategic guidance or have practical questions about preparing your organisation for this shift, you can reach me at [email protected]
More on that in Part 2.
