Your SEO team is optimizing a door people stopped using
Purchases that start inside an AI chat are up 200%. Yours isn't in the sentence.
Good morning!
Somewhere in your building, a team is still fighting for position on page one of Google. Be kind to them.
Salesforce just put a number on the thing they’re optimizing away from. In its new State of Commerce Report, the use of agentic search as the first step in a purchase journey grew 200% year over year. Traffic referred from AI chats grew somewhere between 150% and 428% in every quarter they measured, pulled from the behavior of 1.5 billion shoppers. Over the same stretch, discovery through your own brand-owned pages fell 7%, and traditional search fell 15%.
So the shopper arrives pre-briefed. Something told them what to consider, what to skip, and roughly what to pay, before your site ever loaded.
Twenty-eight percent of commerce orgs actually use agentic AI today. The other seventy-two are polishing a funnel whose front door quietly moved down the street.
You don’t have to panic-buy an agent this week. You do have to know what ChatGPT and Gemini say when someone asks for a product like yours, and whether your name shows up in the answer at all.
— Peter & Torsten
Talk on the market
Caila Schwartz, who runs shopper insights for Salesforce’s commerce arm, said the quiet part:
Customers aren’t starting with 10 blue links anymore. They’re asking an AI what to buy, and by the time they reach your site, they’ve already formed an opinion.
Caila Schwartz, Head of Agentic Commerce Shopper Insights, Salesforce
She sells the tool that claims to fix this, so calibrate the urgency accordingly. The behavior underneath it isn’t hers to spin. The opinion sets before you get a word in.
Numbers matter
56% / 42% — Share of consumers who admit they can’t reliably tell AI content from human, versus the share who say a brand’s low-quality or “uncanny” AI ad would hurt their opinion of it, in DoubleVerify’s new global study.
They can’t spot it, but they can feel it, and they hold it against you.
Daily prompt
Act as a buyer researching [your category] with an AI assistant. Ask the five questions a real buyer asks before shortlisting a vendor. For each answer, tell me: does [my brand] appear, how is it described, which competitors get named ahead of it, and what source is the AI leaning on. Then give me the three changes to my public content most likely to get my brand into that first answer.
Use this when you’re building next quarter’s content plan. Run it in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, paste the output into the plan, and you’ll be the only person in the room who can say what the assistants actually tell buyers about you. That’s a five-minute audit that reframes an entire roadmap.
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CMO corner
A vague strategy creates busy leaders. Precise systems make you optional.
Read the second sentence again, because most people flinch at “optional.” That’s the goal, not the insult. If keeping up with the AI-discovery shift needs your personal attention every Monday to stay on the rails, you didn’t build a response. You built a recurring meeting.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
We run an interview series with marketing leaders about how AI actually changes their work. Real use cases, not predictions.
If you’re doing something worth talking about, the opportunity is free and available for anyone. Simply reply to this email with your pitch.
Tool upgrade
If the game is getting your brand into AI answers, here are three tools built for exactly that, in order of where they fit:
Frase — best for auditing which questions the AI engines answer in your category, then building content that matches the intent. Try Frase here →
Scalenut — best for turning that audit into full, briefed content fast, without a week of outlining. Try Scalenut here →
RankPrompt — best for tracking whether your brand actually starts showing up in AI answers over time, so you’re measuring, not guessing. Try RankPrompt here →
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Learn this
Before you argue for any of this, you’ll want the research framing.
It walks through using AI to map what your buyers actually ask and where your brand is missing from the conversation, which is the exact gap the AI-discovery shift is opening. Built for marketers who need signal this week, not a research degree.
We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more about AI marketing for free for everyone. Browse our learning resources on our site for free.
That’s it for today!
See you next time,
— Peter & Torsten
