Anecdotally, everyone knows there are a plethora of AI agents out there, and they’re browsing the web a lot more often these days. BrightEdge Consulting quantified the trend and shared statistics at its BrightEdge Spark event in New York City earlier this month: A third of all web traffic is now coming from AI agents, and it’s growing at a clip of 150% on a month-over-month basis. The overwhelming majority of that—87%—is coming from ChatGPT.

On the sidelines of the event, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu told me that AI agents are getting much more capable and tackling more use cases. They’re doing deeper dives into all of the content that answers a specific query, and they’re also getting a better understanding of the natural next questions and deeper research that a user wants to know.

But what does a user want? And what, exactly, is AI looking for? That’s changing all the time—both as users improve their queries and as AI systems “learn” how to better find and package information.

This information should help enlighten both consumers and B2B customers, who are using AI for company research. I talked to Alex Roy Rajan, founder and CEO of SalesboxAI, about how to use AI and technology to both find B2B customers in the rapidly changing sales pipeline and improve your customer experience. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

In his keynote address at BrightEdge Spark, CEO Jim Yu said brands often see that AI search is using sources like YouTube videos and Reddit posts to form its results. Many brands have responded by doing things like bulking up their YouTube presence and working more with influencers.

However, Yu said, that might not be the right strategy. He pulled up information for a brand that consistently had a high amount of YouTube sources. But a deeper look found that the video cited most often came from an outside account with relatively few followers that summarized the brand’s return policies.

BrightEdge is launching a new tool for companies to gain more visibility into how AI platforms are representing their brands and how agents are experiencing their digital presence. Called AI Hyper Cube, it shows information including the prompts that mention a brand, the sources AI systems rely on, how competitors appear in AI searches, the sentiment of AI-generated narratives, and whether AI is including old issues—like controversies or recalls from years ago.

Yu told me it’s important to take a holistic view of brand and sentiment in the era of AI search. The days of click-and-convert are over, as AI is now paving the way to a customer’s brand journey. AI is also demolishing all silos around the content about your brand—many people are now getting into brand information through support pages, Yu said.

If you’re selling patio furniture, for........

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