How US Brands Are Rethinking Their Marketing Pitch for AI Shoppers

A new category of startup is helping US brands adapt their marketing strategies for a world in which artificial intelligence agents, rather than human shoppers, may increasingly decide what to buy — and from whom.

Traffic to US retail sites from AI sources increased 393 per cent in 2026, according to a report from Adobe. Morgan Stanley research projects that by 2030, "agent-influenced spend" could constitute up to 20 per cent of total US e-commerce, equivalent to US$385 billion.

The shift is prompting fundamental changes to how brands present themselves online. "When you advertise to humans, you target eyeballs, emotions and dopamine, but when you advertise to agents, you advertise to logic, a very mathematical logic," said Aviv Shamny, co-founder and CEO of Limy, an "AI search platform" backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Jeff Blackman, managing director at marketing agency Barbarian Group, said the risk of inaction is significant. "More and more, you'll just need to click 'buy' in the AI chat interface – you'll never go to a brand's site," he said. "The risk of not being prepared could mean you won't show up."

Retailers invest in AI readiness

Tyler Ackerman, CEO of RTA Store, a family-owned online cabinetry retailer, said he decided to invest in AI visibility in 2025 after noticing his company was no longer appearing in large language model recommendations. RTA Store paid US$15,000 to New Generation, a San Francisco startup that transforms companies' "static product catalogues into structured data and generative interfaces that AI can understand."

Ackerman said the changes — ranging from updates to the site's underlying code to the addition of an AI widget handling product inquiries — have been effective. He envisions spending up to US$12,000 a month in the future to maintain visibility to AI agents. "As these systems get more intelligent, we're going to have no choice but to spend a bit more," he said.

Caelean Barnes, CEO of two-year-old startup Gauge, said AI agents favour content that is "very factual, straightforward and with lots of statistics." She added: "You need to make sure the facts about your business are readily available to agents across all the different surfaces they might look at."

New Generation, in partnership with Visa, has developed a scoring system that rates a brand website's "readiness for interacting with agents" from 1 to 100 by simulating agents' attempts to navigate it. Jonathan Arena, New Generation's CEO, illustrated the stakes: a customer's AI agent failing to access a credit card application form could mean a lost sale, with the customer never knowing the transaction failed.

Technical and strategic debate

Limy takes a more technical approach, focusing on how AI systems represent language as numerical vectors. Shamny said the startup helps brands "identify the vector spaces agents are interested in" and determines which prompts — which he calls MVPs, or most valuable prompts — result in the most purchases.

Not all practitioners are convinced by such methods. Toby Coulthard, founder of AI marketing platform Jacquard, cautioned that the models are changing "faster than our ability to try to game them," arguing that tactics effective today may be obsolete within months. He said marketers should return to "fundamental marketing principles."

Akshat Trivedi, an industry analyst at FTI Consulting, drew parallels to the mobile commerce transition and the early days of search engine optimisation, where first movers gained outsized advantages before the market equalised. He noted that what distinguishes the current moment is the pace of change. "Soon we might see products that launch first on AI or discoverability that is driven by brands named in such a way that AI picks them up more than others," Trivedi said.