For two decades, SEO determined who got discovered online. You wrote content, targeted keywords, optimised pages, and waited for Google to reward you with intent.

But this Black Friday quietly signalled the end of SEO’s monopoly.

According to Adobe and Salesforce:

• $11.8B–$18B spent online

• 17–25% of purchases driven by AI

• 805% YoY surge in AI-driven shopping traffic

• ~$3B in GMV shaped by machine decisions

This wasn’t minor. This was AI influencing billions of dollars in purchasing behaviour.

LLMs didn’t just help shoppers. They became the new discovery engine comparing prices, ranking alternatives, monitoring drops, filtering noise, and pushing decisions.

And unlike humans, agents don’t click ads.
They don’t read blog posts.
They don’t scroll.

They parse.

Welcome to the world of AEO "Agent Engine Optimisation"

If agents can’t parse your business, your data, your products, or your API…
you effectively don’t exist.

SEO was built around human workflows:

• Humans type queries

• Humans read / death scroll pages

• Humans choose

Agents don’t do any of that.

Agents do this:

1. Discover capability

2. Parse structure

3. Match task → endpoint

4. Call, evaluate, iterate

This is a completely different discovery mechanism.

The winners in the agent economy won’t be the ones with the best content. They’ll be the ones with the best structure.

The most parse able businesses will see the most agent driven demand.

And Black Friday showed that demand is already non-trivial.

AEO isn’t marketing.
It’s infrastructure making your online footprint machine readable, machine discoverable, and machine-integrable.

Here’s what businesses, API providers, data vendors, and platforms must do now.

Agents don’t browse your homepage. They crawl it.

Your website should expose:

A clean, complete sitemap that accurately lists key resources. Agents use this to map your surface area.

Don’t accidentally block known LLM crawlers and agent systems. Most WAFs and CDNs do this by default unless configured.

Product, pricing, FAQ, API endpoints, docs all should have structured schema attached.

Agents need meaningful structure. Div soup breaks them.

If an agent can’t see your documentation until after a login screen, it won’t integrate.

One page that machine agents can repeatedly fetch to understand your offering at a high level.

This doesn’t replace your human-facing site. It augments it.

If agents can’t understand your API, they can’t use it.

You need:

This is the single most important AEO artifact. Agents parse it to understand endpoints, parameters, types, errors, examples, flows.

Clear definitions = fewer integration errors.

Agents rely on stability. If your contract changes without a signal, adoption dies instantly.

These files help LLMs and autonomous agents interpret what your API does and when to call it:

A structured text manifest describing purpose, capabilities, and entry points.

Machine Control Protocol manifest for agent frameworks.

E.g. /capabilities.json, /pricing.json, /auth.json

These act like machine-friendly brochures.

Developers read conceptual pages. Agents follow rules.

Agents need docs that explain:

• When to call which endpoint

• How to handle timeouts

• What error codes imply

• When to backoff or retry

• Which fields matter for different tasks

• What a “good” vs “bad” response looks like

This is AEO’s biggest mindset shift.

Humans improvise.

Agents execute.

If your documentation doesn’t encode decision paths, agents can’t reliably operate.

This is the bridge between parsing and consumption.

Agents can only scale usage if:

• Every request is authorised automatically

• Every request is paid automatically

• No API keys or subscriptions are needed

• No human onboarding is required

x402 unlocks this: per-request, atomic payments using stablecoins.

Why this matters:

Humans make 20 API calls a day.
Agents make 20,000.

Autonomous demand requires autonomous payment.

This is where the next generation of machine native businesses will be built.

Black Friday proved that agents now:

• Evaluate

• Compare

• Filter

• Rank

• Optimise

• Influence purchases

Soon they’ll account for a significant portion of total API and data consumption across the internet.

If your business isn’t agent readable, it isn’t future readable.

SEO decides who is relevant to humans.
AEO decides who is relevant to machines.

And machines are where real volume is going.

The data is clear: agents are already shaping demand at scale.

If agents can’t find you, parse you, understand you, or pay you, you simply don’t exist in their world.

The businesses that embrace AEO now will be the ones discovered automatically, integrated automatically, and consumed automatically.

AEO isn’t a trend.

It’s the architectural foundation for the next wave of commerce the agentic wave.

Have I missed any aspect let me know in the comments

For two decades, SEO determined who got discovered online. You wrote content, targeted keywords, optimised pages, and waited for Google to reward you with intent.

But this Black Friday quietly signalled the end of SEO’s monopoly.

According to Adobe and Salesforce:

• $11.8B–$18B spent online

• 17–25% of purchases driven by AI

• 805% YoY surge in AI-driven shopping traffic

• ~$3B in GMV shaped by machine decisions

This wasn’t minor. This was AI influencing billions of dollars in purchasing behaviour.

LLMs didn’t just help shoppers. They became the new discovery engine comparing prices, ranking alternatives, monitoring drops, filtering noise, and pushing decisions.

And unlike humans, agents don’t click ads.
They don’t read blog posts.
They don’t scroll.

They parse.

Welcome to the world of AEO "Agent Engine Optimisation"

If agents can’t parse your business, your data, your products, or your API…
you effectively don’t exist.

SEO was built around human workflows:

• Humans type queries

• Humans read / death scroll pages

• Humans choose

Agents don’t do any of that.

Agents do this:

1. Discover capability

2. Parse structure

3. Match task → endpoint

4. Call, evaluate, iterate

This is a completely different discovery mechanism.

The winners in the agent economy won’t be the ones with the best content. They’ll be the ones with the best structure.

The most parse able businesses will see the most agent driven demand.

And Black Friday showed that demand is already non-trivial.

AEO isn’t marketing.
It’s infrastructure making your online footprint machine readable, machine discoverable, and machine-integrable.

Here’s what businesses, API providers, data vendors, and platforms must do now.

Agents don’t browse your homepage. They crawl it.

Your website should expose:

A clean, complete sitemap that accurately lists key resources. Agents use this to map your surface area.

Don’t accidentally block known LLM crawlers and agent systems. Most WAFs and CDNs do this by default unless configured.

Product, pricing, FAQ, API endpoints, docs all should have structured schema attached.

Agents need meaningful structure. Div soup breaks them.

If an agent can’t see your documentation until after a login screen, it won’t integrate.

One page that machine agents can repeatedly fetch to understand your offering at a high level.

This doesn’t replace your human-facing site. It augments it.

If agents can’t understand your API, they can’t use it.

You need:

This is the single most important AEO artifact. Agents parse it to understand endpoints, parameters, types, errors, examples, flows.

Clear definitions = fewer integration errors.

Agents rely on stability. If your contract changes without a signal, adoption dies instantly.

These files help LLMs and autonomous agents interpret what your API does and when to call it:

A structured text manifest describing purpose, capabilities, and entry points.

Machine Control Protocol manifest for agent frameworks.

E.g. /capabilities.json, /pricing.json, /auth.json

These act like machine-friendly brochures.

Developers read conceptual pages. Agents follow rules.

Agents need docs that explain:

• When to call which endpoint

• How to handle timeouts

• What error codes imply

• When to backoff or retry

• Which fields matter for different tasks

• What a “good” vs “bad” response looks like

This is AEO’s biggest mindset shift.

Humans improvise.

Agents execute.

If your documentation doesn’t encode decision paths, agents can’t reliably operate.

This is the bridge between parsing and consumption.

Agents can only scale usage if:

• Every request is authorised automatically

• Every request is paid automatically

• No API keys or subscriptions are needed

• No human onboarding is required

x402 unlocks this: per-request, atomic payments using stablecoins.

Why this matters:

Humans make 20 API calls a day.
Agents make 20,000.

Autonomous demand requires autonomous payment.

This is where the next generation of machine native businesses will be built.

Black Friday proved that agents now:

• Evaluate

• Compare

• Filter

• Rank

• Optimise

• Influence purchases

Soon they’ll account for a significant portion of total API and data consumption across the internet.

If your business isn’t agent readable, it isn’t future readable.

SEO decides who is relevant to humans.
AEO decides who is relevant to machines.

And machines are where real volume is going.

The data is clear: agents are already shaping demand at scale.

If agents can’t find you, parse you, understand you, or pay you, you simply don’t exist in their world.

The businesses that embrace AEO now will be the ones discovered automatically, integrated automatically, and consumed automatically.

AEO isn’t a trend.

It’s the architectural foundation for the next wave of commerce the agentic wave.

Have I missed any aspect let me know in the comments