Agent readability is taking over, but mobile marketers are still chasing SEO

Mobile marketers have perfected the wrong game. The SEO era is ending, creating a dangerous blind spot for the agent-first internet as a new wave of discovery rewrites the rules entirely.

As Growth Marketing Team Lead at NineTwoThree AI Studio, Nahshon Cook-Nelson warns that this nearsighted focus might mean missing the next great land grab.

SEOh no: “For years we’ve been obsessed with getting our sites ready for search engines, but that era is ending,” says Cook-Nelson. “The new question every business needs to ask is: how can you make your website and your app more readable to AI agents? That’s the next frontier.”

The takeaway is clear. The game is no longer about chasing keywords to rank on a search page. It’s about making content so clear and authoritative that AI assistants treat it as a source of truth. Being found by Google is one thing; being quoted by AI is another. Get it right and become the authority. Get it wrong and risk disappearing entirely.

Flying blind: The logic is simple: a fundamental change in how information is accessed. “With Google, I have all the data on how people are searching for my brand,” Cook-Nelson explains. “With ChatGPT, all I see is a referral. I don’t know what they searched or how they found me.” Preparing for this agent-first internet requires setting up your site to be understood by AI, where an LLM.txt file is becoming the new standard.

Crawl before you run: For all the talk about AI agents and predictive models, Cook-Nelson sees a more pressing problem. Many companies are still missing foundational steps. “It’s a lot more important for an early-stage company to make sure their MMP is set up properly and they’re actually tracking installs,” he says. “Many of the advanced lessons are more practical for bigger brands.” The industry is dreaming about agent-readability while still fumbling the basics.

Clickless commerce: That preparation points to a future where the customer journey may not involve a single website click. “The next step is you'll just tell your agent, ‘buy me this,’ and you'll hit checkout within the chat itself,” he predicts. “The real question is, how do you get your company ready to speak directly with an agent that comes to your site on the back end, makes a purchase, and sends a confirmation code directly through the chat?”

The boring revolution: That industry disconnect fuels an AI hype cycle that misses the point entirely. Cook-Nelson argues the real value is found not in flashy demos, but in a practical workflow that prioritizes human oversight. “The most effective model we’ve found is one that starts with human ideation, lets an AI agent handle the mundane middle steps, and ends with human curation,” he explains. “The most powerful use cases are personal and solve a specific company problem, not the flashy ones you see online.”