AI agents don’t browse your site or respond to marketing narratives. They retrieve, validate, and surface structured information to answer engines and consumer agents. That creates a fundamental shift towards business-to-agent (B2A) marketing strategies: how do marketing leaders target agents and grow their trust to retain their loyalty? To gain competitive advantage with machines – a.k.a. machine advantage – leaders must: 

1. Look beyond getting content ready for agent visibility: Shape the agent’s context with a content strategy.

AI agents don’t rely on your website alone — they retrieve content from third-party sources to determine content relevance. Fully 69% of AI decision-makers believe that genAI tools will always produce the same outputs, per Forrester’s State of AI Survey, 2025. However, answer engines develop varied responses to each customer prompt – that is, non-deterministic experiences. That means designing a content strategy for all the content influencing agents and aligning messaging for agents across earned, owned, and paid channels. If you don’t shape the context, agents will write a different brand narrative than you might have intended.  

2. Invest in information architecture: Make the agent fluent in your content.

Per Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2026 (B2B), only 24% of B2B marketing decision-makers plan to ensure that their content is visible and authoritative in AI-powered search and genAI tools. However, AI agents seek a straightforward information architecture on your site so they can extract content and engage in a dialogue with human buyers (and soon to be machine buyers). That means the content on your site should be fluent in your sector’s terminology to minimize the need for agents to infer (and hallucinate). Information architecture used to be a phase of website redesign projects – it is becoming the foundation for how you do business with machines. 

3. Amplify content: Build agent trust so agents favor your brand.

According to Forrester’s Digital Business and Strategy Survey, 2026, 69% of digital business strategy decision-makers assert that they are in full deployment or piloting greater visibility of products and services on ChatGPT or other AI answer engines. However, as agentic loyalty develops, AI agents favor sources that are reliable and consistent across multiple interactions and multiple sources – a single content project won’t suffice. Your content is competing against the constantly evolving training set of all your competitors. That means you need to continuously update product data, reinforce and target inaccurate claims across the web, and ensure facts are easy for agents to verify. Content governance is now a technical requirement to remain relevant in an agent’s consideration set.  

If you are a Forrester client interested in discussing how content strategy for humans and agents differ, and what you can do to target agents, book an inquiry or guidance session with me. I am available to discuss additional topics with you such as: content management systems, agentic commerce, distributed and dynamic commerce strategies, and commerce services provider selection.