The Rise of Agentic "Search" Traffic

For the first time in the history, your most influential website visitors aren’t human.

AI agents, large language models, and machine-led search experiences are reshaping how audiences discover, consume, and act on information online. Platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Anthropic are increasingly mediating digital interactions, often bypassing traditional search results entirely.

At Deepend, we’ve seen this shift firsthand. Month-on-month, a growing percentage of traffic to our clients' websites, and our own, now originates from non-human sources: AI assistants crawling, extracting, and reformatting content.

The challenge for brands? If your content isn’t structured, surfaced, and optimised for this new audience, you risk becoming invisible in an agent-led ecosystem.

Why Traditional SEO & Content Strategy Are No Longer Enough

For over two decades, content strategy has focused on persuading humans, ie. shaping messaging for emotional resonance, brand storytelling, and conversion.

Today, however, websites need to speak fluently to two audiences simultaneously:

1. Machines - the agents that increasingly decide what gets seen, cited, and surfaced.

2. Humans - who still make the final decisions.

This shift needs new frameworks, new measures of success, and new ways of structuring content.

Four Forces Redefining Content Strategy

1. From Pages to Fragments

AI agents don’t “read” entire pages. They extract specific fragments: definitions, answers, statistics, and hooks.

• Build modular, standalone content blocks - FAQs, glossaries, schema-driven snippets.

• Craft content that can be quoted in isolation, not just consumed in full.

2. Authority Is Earned Through AI Visibility

Generative search engines now decide whose answers get surfaced. Winning visibility requires more than keywords:

• Apply schema markup for services, products, and FAQs.

• Optimise for entity-based search, ensuring your data is machine-readable.

• Use LLMS.txt and Google-Extended directives to control how AI agents crawl, ingest, and cite your content.

3. AI Is Disrupting the User Journey

Traditional search funnels are collapsing. Where users once clicked multiple results before converting, LLM-powered interfaces now deliver single-answer responses.

• If your content isn’t formatted for extraction, you’re bypassed entirely.

• Organisations must invest in content strategies designed for multi-surface ecosystems - where AI agents, voice assistants, and chat interfaces mediate discovery.

4. Declarative, Agent-Optimised Hooks Win

AI prioritises clear, confident statements over narrative-led copy.

• Lead with assertive, answer-oriented headlines.

• Provide summary sentences that explain the core idea upfront.

• Example:

  • Human-first headline → “Welcome to better banking.”

  • Agent-optimised headline → “Switch to a bank that saves you $250/year on fees.”

In agent-driven ecosystems, clarity beats creativity - but balance both for humans and machines.

Agentic Traffic Readiness Audit

To thrive in this new environment, organisations need more than incremental optimisation. At Deepend, we’ve built a structured AI Readiness Audit to help brands adapt, compete, and win in agent-driven ecosystems.