from being found to being chosen by the agent
Search is moving from a page you click to an answer, and next, to an action an agent takes on a buyer's behalf. This piece looks at the evidence that the shift is already underway, and the work I believe keeps a brand visible, and buyable, by 2027.
For twenty years the job was to optimise a web page so a person would find it and click. AI Overviews and assistants changed the first half of that: the answer now sits above the links, built from sources the AI chooses. My 2027 view The next step changes the second half too: an agent acting for the buyer reads the answer, weighs up the options and completes the order itself. The page never gets the visit.
The same buying journey, three eras. Each step moves the decision further away from your website and closer to your data.
More searches are happening than ever, yet fewer of them send a visit to your site, because AI now answers on the results page. Visibility and traffic have divorced. The numbers below are why every recommendation in the piece exists.
Sources: Similarweb via SE Roundtable, 2025 · Seer Interactive, 2025–26 · Visibility Labs, 2025
The traffic isn't disappearing evenly. Seer's April 2026 study of 5.47 million searches shows the brands the AI cites keep most of the remaining clicks, earning around 120% more than uncited brands on the same query, while uncited pages fall off a cliff. And the queries most exposed are the informational ones: 95% of "X vs Y" comparisons and 86% of question-format searches now trigger an AI Overview. My 2027 view The brands the AI cites today are the suppliers agents will buy from tomorrow.
None of this requires abandoning the fundamentals. Google's own AI-search guidance, published May 2026, lands on the same conclusion: the foundations that make a page findable are the foundations that get it into the answer.
“Optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
Everything else in the piece, the titles, the structured data, the speed work, traces back to these four ideas.
The clean, structured version of your catalogue becomes the canonical asset; the website is just the rendering. If an agent has to load your site like a human to read a price, you've already lost to a competitor who served clean data.
Asset, not afterthoughtCrawling is reading. Calling is doing. Whatever a buyer can do on your site, check stock, get trade pricing, reorder, an agent needs a documented, safe way to do too. The easiest suppliers to call become the default reorder.
Reading to doingIn an agent's answer there is no page one: one supplier, maybe three. You're either in the consideration set or not seen at all. Consistent, verifiable facts across the web become the new backlinks.
Consideration set or nothingAn agent ordering on someone's account is liability-aware. Unclear lead times, hidden freight, vague returns and phantom stock all become a hard no. The lowest-risk, clearest supplier tends to win.
Risk signals beat trust signalsA clickbait title earns nothing from something that never clicks. Meta titles and descriptions still matter, but their job has changed: an agent wants a clear, factual statement of what the page is and offers. The same service business, two ways:
How Google finds and processes your pages is how its AI systems reach your data. Structured data sits on top of these; without them, neither Google's systems nor an agent can reach your content in the first place.
My 2027 view The schema property worth watching is potentialAction. It's optional today, and most suppliers only describe themselves. Declaring what an agent can actually do, with a real endpoint behind it, is what I think will separate the brands an agent can order from in 2027.
One table to hand your exec team. Today's habits on the left; where I believe agent visibility lands by 2027 on the right.
| Dimension | Old world · SEO | New world · Agent visibility |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of competition | The URL | The callable action |
| You optimise for | The crawler | The transacting agent |
| The win | The ranking | The recommendation |
| Titles & meta | Clickbait copywriting | Plain, factual answers |
| Structured data | Nice-to-have | The source of truth |
| Speed | UX nicety | Qualification criteria |
| Authority comes from | Backlinks counted | Consistency across the web |
| Content wins on | Keyword coverage | First-hand, non-commodity POV |
| You measure | Clicks & sessions | Citation & transaction share |
| Failure looks like | A lower ranking | Silent invisibility |
This is a thought piece, not a verdict, and the best part of putting one out is hearing back from the people doing the actual work. If you've got a different take, you're already seeing this play out, or you want a senior read on where your own visibility stands, I'd love to chat.
The full piece, with the worked B2B example, the SERP comparisons and the speed and authority sections, was published with Bright Labs.