AI Search is Here. Are You Ready to Be Found?

With OpenAI, Amazon, Visa, and Mastercard all rolling out AI shopping agents that make purchases on your behalf, a big shift is underway: your largest source of web traffic may no longer be people — it’s bots.

AI-driven referral traffic is surging. Adobe reported spikes of 1,200% or more from last year. And as shopping agents make headlines and reshape how consumers discover and buy, the pressure is on brands to ensure their websites are visible, crawlable, and built to perform.

If your site isn’t optimized for AI, you risk being invisible to the next generation of search. Understanding how bots interact with your content and how to stay discoverable is now critical.

For brands, the AI moment is already here. If your team has noticed an uptick in bot traffic to your site, you’re not alone. Over 50% of all web traffic now comes from bots and generative AI powers a growing share of those bots. These bots are crawling your content to index it or retrieve fresher information, while large language models (LLMs) are the ones summarizing and reshaping that content and, in some cases, influencing whether it’s surfaced to consumers at all.

And this now forces brands to consider a big question: Are you in control of how AI sees and serves your brand? And the answer is the focus of our new white paper, Be Found Everywhere: Your AI search playbook. It’s a practical guide for marketing leaders navigating this new-era search landscape, one where AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta AI, and Bing Copilot increasingly influence visibility. 

As our Global VP of Professional Services, Tim Resnik, recently explained in an article for Search Engine Land: All crawler bots use similar methods to discover websites, but AI bots operate a bit differently than traditional search engine crawlers. Using natural language processing and machine learning, AI bots interpret content with a deeper understanding of context, intent and nuance. In other words, rankings still matter for discoverability, but so does making sure these bots can find what matters most to your brand.   

So, what can you and your team do? 

Our white paper outlines a four-part framework for future-proofing your AI visibility strategy: 

1. Assess risks and opportunities: Develop a strategic AI bot governance plan 

2. Control how you appear in generative AI: Analyze your website’s traffic patterns and AI search results for your brand 

3. Empower your team with automation: Embrace the right AI-powered tools for your team 

4. Iterate based on data: Test, measure, refine, and repeat 

Building your AI governance plan: 8 questions to consider 

As more background context, bots now do more than index pages. They validate ads, populate AI search results, and train large language models. Understanding what kind of bot traffic you’re attracting enables you to focus your efforts where it matters. If consumers are using AI to discover brands, you want to make sure those bots are finding your best content. 

Before you build your AI search strategy, you need to ask the right questions , the kind that shape a strong AI governance plan. We sat down with our search experts and we broke down the nine most critical questions you need to answer: 

1. Do you want AI models to learn from your content?  

Allowing AI platforms to train on your content means you’re giving them first-party material they can rely on instead of third-party sources to represent your brand as accurately as possible in summaries, comparisons, and recommendations. If you're selective about your brand voice, story, and accuracy, this could be an advantage. But if you're concerned about data security or intellectual property, you’ll want to take a more cautious approach. 

 2. Which parts of your site should AI bots see and which should they skip?  

Some pages are essential to your brand authority like product specifications, values, and educational content. Other content can help reinforce your brand’s authority, such as rewards or testimonials. On the other hand, some other content might have little value for training bots, like thin content pages, or even do more harm than good, like sensitive or outdated information. It’s worth making a plan for what you want bots to find and what you’d rather keep behind the curtain. 

3. Is it important for AI search to surface your most recent updates?  

Because LLMs training data have a cut-off date, it means that they have information about your brand up until a certain date. Anything that happened after, new line of products, price change, new delivery policies, or breaking news, LLMs won’t know. This is why AI platforms use live retrieval bots to find the latest changes on your site and use them to complement their answers. 

Since AI models can only reference the data they know about, blocking them means they will only be able to answer partially to questions where your brand could be relevant. They might, for instance, talk about your brand values, but won’t reference your products because they don’t know your latest price. 

In most cases, you’ll want a live retrieval bot to access parts of your website. This is how you stay competitive when bots are generating summaries and recommendations on the fly. But if your business model depends on traffic to gated or ad-driven content, real-time access could come at a cost. 

4. Which content categories matter most to your strategy?  

Whether it’s brand messaging, product details, customer reviews, or blog articles, prioritize what you want to be found and shown. Bots have limited bandwidth, and what they see shapes how your brand is positioned on AI platforms. 

5. What do you want to keep bots away from?  

Blocking low-value content can prevent AI systems from wasting time on collecting irrelevant or outdated information. You might also need to consider data security, user-generated content quality, or proprietary assets that AI shouldn’t summarize. 

6. Where do you want to be found?  

Different AI platforms serve different audiences. For example, ChatGPT and Perplexity are gaining traction for information retrieval and product discovery, especially in retail, with new features enabling users to compare, evaluate, and even shop directly from search results. Similarly, TikTok’s ByteDance bots align with more trend-based discovery among younger audiences, and Amazon and others are now rolling out “buy-for-me” shopping agents, signaling a broader push toward AI-assisted commerce, many are calling “agentic commerce.” Prioritize platforms that align with your target market and goals.

 7. How visible are your competitors in AI search?  

 This is a great gut check. Have your team test your most valuable keywords across AI platforms. Who gets mentioned? Are you part of the conversation? Is your competition part of the conversation? Yes? What are they doing right? If not, you’ve got an opportunity or a visibility gap to close. 

 8. Which bots are crawling your site and what do they do?  

Different bots have different behaviors. Some scrape for training data, others retrieve real-time content, and some build indexes. Use tools like Botify Analytics to determine which bots visit your site, and build access rules accordingly. 

‍

After working through these questions, you’ll walk away with a clearer understanding of where you want to show up, what content should be visible, and which bots are worth welcoming (or blocking) and our white paper should be helpful in filling in the rest. 

Now you have an AI search governance plan, it's time to get things done. You don't know where to start? Book a consultation and explore our full white paper here.

‍