AI agents will reshape search and commerce, SEO agencies adapt

Search is moving from ranking to machine decisions

Search is slipping from a list of links into a layer of instructions, summaries, and transactions. Greg Isenberg’s warning is the sharpest version of that shift: AI agents will soon eclipse human internet use, and search and commerce need to be rebuilt for software that reads, decides, and acts. Google’s AI Overviews, which began rolling out to all users in the United States in May 2024, are the clearest mainstream sign that the old keyword-and-click model is already changing.

Google has said AI Overviews were used billions of times through its Search Labs experiment, and the company has also described the experience as driving higher satisfaction and more complex queries. That combination matters because it shows the product is not just a novelty on top of search. It is becoming part of how people ask, compare, and move toward answers.

Clicks are becoming harder to earn

The traffic story is where the change turns from theory into pressure. Pew Research Center found that in March 2025, 58% of surveyed U.S. adults encountered at least one Google search that produced an AI-generated summary, and users were less likely to click links when that summary appeared. That is a real threat to the familiar SEO playbook, especially for brands that still measure success mainly in blue-link rankings.

The new reality is that visibility is no longer just about being in the top ten results. It is about being cited, summarized, or selected by AI systems, whether those systems are Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT-style agents, or other agentic interfaces. Coverage in Search Engine Land by Katharina Schumacher, Roger Roberts, and Katharina Giebel reflects the same shift: AI search is increasingly being treated as a discovery, decisioning, and transaction layer rather than a simple referral engine.

Operator pushes the web toward agentic browsing

OpenAI added more fuel to the shift with Operator, a research preview launched in January 2025. Operator can use its own browser to type, click, and scroll through webpages on a user’s behalf, which changes the stakes for every site that depends on human attention to function. Once an agent can move through a page like a user, the question is no longer only whether a page is readable to people. It is whether the page is legible to a machine that is trying to complete a task.

That is why the current moment feels bigger than another search update. The browser is becoming an actor, not just a window, and that changes how brands need to think about everything from product descriptions to booking flows. If the system can compare, decide, and act, then the site has to supply clean signals at every step.

Commerce is next, and it is already being redesigned

McKinsey’s October 17, 2025 report on agentic commerce makes the same point from the shopping side: agentic AI could radically remake the entire shopping experience for consumers and merchants. That has immediate implications for retailers, travel brands, and any business that depends on structured information to close a sale. In agentic commerce, the winner is often not the loudest brand, but the one whose data is easiest to interpret and act on.

This is also where the search and commerce stories merge. A recommendation engine that can browse and transact will favor products with strong merchant feeds, clear availability, and machine-readable attributes. Booking paths, checkout steps, and comparison pages all become part of the optimization surface, not just the marketing funnel.

What agencies can sell right now

This is the real growth opportunity for SEO agencies: not a vague promise of “AI strategy,” but a set of practical services that make clients easier for agents to find, understand, and choose. The early land grab is in work that already has a measurable output, especially for merchants and publishers.

• Merchant feed structuring that cleans titles, variants, inventory fields, and price data for machine consumption.
• Machine-readable product data, including schema that clarifies attributes, availability, reviews, and fulfillment.
• Booking and workflow integrations that let agents move from recommendation to reservation or purchase without friction.
• Content built for agent decision-making, with concise answers, clear comparisons, and explicit next steps.
• AI visibility audits that track whether a brand is surfaced, cited, summarized, or skipped by major systems.
• Content licensing and crawler controls that help clients decide what to allow, what to monetize, and what to protect.

The important part is that each of those services is closer to operations than to hype. They can be scoped, priced, and measured in the language clients already understand: better feed quality, cleaner schema coverage, higher completion rates, and more efficient transactions. That makes them saleable now, not someday.

Publishers are already putting a price on access

Cloudflare’s 2025 move to introduce pay-per-crawl shows how quickly the web is hardening around AI access. Its AI Crawl Control lets content owners customize 402 Payment Required responses, which is a blunt signal that crawling is becoming a commercial negotiation. The implication for agencies is simple: AI visibility will increasingly be shaped by rights, licensing, and access rules, not just by content quality.

That creates a new kind of advisory work. Agencies will need to explain how clients want their content used, whether they want to license it, restrict it, or charge for it. In practice, AI search optimization is becoming part SEO, part data architecture, and part media-rights strategy.

The winning agencies will build for agents first

The agencies that move first will not wait for the market to settle. They will audit where clients already appear in AI summaries, where their feeds break, where booking paths confuse machines, and where product data is too thin to support a confident recommendation. They will package those fixes into clear offers that sit between technical SEO, content operations, and commerce enablement.

That is what makes this moment so consequential. Rankings still matter, but they are no longer the whole game. The next phase belongs to the agencies that can make a brand easy to cite, easy to choose, and easy to transact with when the search interface is no longer just a page, but an agent.