Your newest ICP will never eat dinner, sleep, or have sex. Still, your biz may depend on placating them properly
You may or may not know it, but you have a new ideal customer (ICP) who’s a bit of a strange bird. This customer holds so much potential for you that, soon enough, you will build a second website (or at least a new section of your site) just for them.
And, as much as the design choices you make for this site will matter, they are going to be very different from those you dealt with when you designed your current one.
That’s because your new ideal customer is an AI bot. And your new site (or at least a portion of your existing site) will be entirely for their use. Humans won’t see this new bot-acular playground at all, but it’ll matter a whole lot.
Why am I so certain about this?
A mix of stats and trends. Three items suggest brands must treat bots as a key stakeholder and cater to them specifically:
- Per Imperva, bot traffic now makes up the majority of internet traffic
- The fastest segment of bot traffic growth is from so-called RAG bots (Retrieval-Augmented Generation bots). These are the soldiers Claude, Gemini Perplexity and ChatGPT send out to scrape the web when you query them for answers. According to Tollbit, RAG scraping bots now outpace training bots in terms of activity by 2.5x. This attests to the ascendence of GenAI search. Scrapes for RAGs grew 49% from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025. Basically, more AI search volume = more RAG bot content consumption. We are not even close to the peak.
- OpenAI has just released ChatGPT Agent, which should open up agentic commerce in a new way. Increasingly people are going to use AI for common tasks that they’d used a computer for. It doesn’t matter if this initial model sucks (as it invariably will in some ways). The point is it is going to change how people use and view AI and it is going to scale bot traffic and content consumption in a not-yet-seen way.
What does this all mean?
Mostly that AI bots and agents are becoming the new gatekeepers of attention. You need to adjust to this reality, and quickly. We believe there will be serious consequences for any brand that does not speak ”agent” or “RAG-bot” within a year or two.
As generative-AI search and agentic commerce grow, benefits will accrue to those brands who are ahead of the curve and can optimize their presence, especially on owned media where they have the greatest degree of control.
How can you best set your brand up for the new era?
The first part, as I said, is a shift in mindset. You need to treat AI agents like an ICP. Yes, a somewhat bizarre ICP that is hyper-rational, always active, and immune to emotional persuasion, but an ideal customer nonetheless.
The north star is signal clarity. You don’t want to confuse the bots. This has to do with how AI works. Unlike traditional Google search, AI models don’t rank pages, but instead read the relationships between words and concepts, then predict what should come next based on that structure. The closer ideas are, and the more often AI encounters a pattern, the more likely the model is to connect them.
So how do you execute on this?
The answer is evolving, but early best practices are emerging.
The simplest and clearest framework for structuring content for AI agents and RAG bots that we’ve seen comes from the GEO company, Evertune.
It is called S.E.T, or structure, explainability and trustworthiness. It underlines the importance of design and copywriting for this new bot ICP and “extra” site that we will all have soon.
I’ll paraphrase Evertune here:
S — Structure: words and design
- Start sections with a clear answer or summary.
- Use headers, bullets, and short paragraphs to break up info.
- Chunk text: one idea per paragraph. Again the point is no confusion and avoiding unnecessary complexity on the altar of signal clarity
- Use tables for comparisons and JSON-LD/schema where it fits (FAQs, product data specs, and reviews).
E — Explainability: be clear and literal
- Bots don’t guess well. Don’t force them to.
- Avoid vague language (“last week,” “they,” etc.).
- Use exact dates, names, and data.
- Give background that helps models learn—even if it’s too long for humans.
- Be specific, not clever.
T — Trustworthiness: importance of proof
- Models lean toward reliable, consistent info.
- Cite sources when you should. Keep data fresh.
- Follow the classic SEO framework of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust).
- Repeat key ideas across multiple credible channels in natural language.
- Diversify format and delivery of message channels: deploy across blogs, FAQ, tables, product sheets and other places.
Where do we go next?
The brands that thrive in the next few years will be the ones that learn to speak fluent ‘bot.’
Here is how to start: if you have a paid tool like Scrunch or Evertune, use it for assessing your main pages. If you don’t, then just start small. Audit one high-traffic page on your site this week. Does it pass the S.E.T. test? Is the key information in the first paragraph? Are your headers descriptive rather than clever? Can a bot easily extract your main value proposition?
You won’t get it perfect the first time since this is a new realm.
If you want to chat more about this, get in touch.