Getting your brand ready for AI agent discovery

For a trip to Tennessee, I wanted a modern, fresh, clean-looking hotel near Knoxville’s airport. It had to have a customer rating of 8.5 or higher and cost less than $130 a night, including tax. I didn’t want to spend hours researching hotels, so I used Gemini.

It returned 15 listings that appeared to match my criteria, along with pictures, links, and a comparison chart. It didn’t just find options. It evaluated them. If you’re the marketer whose hotel either made the shortlist or didn’t, the question isn’t “did we appear,” but “what did the AI decide about us?”

If you oversee digital revenue for a retailer, hospitality company, or other commerce-driven business, you’ve been in a meeting where someone asks, “What’s our GEO strategy?” The truth is that most companies are still figuring it out. GEO continues to evolve, but at its core, it’s about making a brand understandable, accurately represented, and discoverable in generative AI answers.

Meanwhile, consumers are looking for faster ways to shortlist and compare options before making a purchase, and AI is increasingly playing a more active role throughout the buying process.

For now, though, many consumers still want the final say. Asking AI for recommendations is one thing. Allowing it to sign into an account, access personal or loyalty information, use a stored credit card, and complete the transaction is another.

Whether or not consumers are ready, the infrastructure is beginning to take shape. OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol are open standards intended to support more interoperable AI-commerce interactions, including structured product information, checkout, payments, and order management.

So the question for your brand now is “What will the AI find, verify, and recommend?”

Can an agent even understand what you sell?

Most product and service information was designed for people, not AI. An AI system needs information structured in a way it can interpret, so it can compare options such as pricing, availability, features, terms, and other limitations.

In most companies, that information is scattered. The booking engine shows one rate, the website shows another. The amenities list promises a free breakfast, but it turns out to be an extra charge at check-in. One channel says checkout is at 11, another says noon.

AI doesn’t do context or nuance. If your information is a mess, AI won’t understand it. It will misread the offering or move on to a listing with information that it can understand. 

Marketers rely on storytelling. AI doesn’t do storytelling. It compares a brand’s claims with reviews, ratings, customer photos, and other independent sources.

Call your property “recently renovated” while guests keep posting photos of the same tired carpet, and the problem isn’t simply that the messaging needs work. The brand claim and the customer experience are misaligned.

Marketers’ job isn’t just optimizing content for an AI answer. It’s making sure the reality behind that content holds up to scrutiny.

Will you know what happened?

Instead of traditional web analytics, you need to ask these four questions:

• Visibility: Did the brand appear in relevant AI searches?
• Consideration: Was it represented accurately and included in the shortlist?
• Selection: Did it meet the decision criteria and become a recommended or preferred option?
• Commercial outcome: Did the consumer visit, add to cart, request a quote, book or purchase?

Brands need to triangulate AI visibility testing, transaction data, customer research, review analysis, on-site behavior, and customer-service feedback.

What to do now

Handling this requires bringing together the people responsible for the information, customer experience, and transaction process. 

Get an executive sponsor. Then bring SEO and content, communications, product, commerce, technology, legal, customer experience, and measurement into a regular working cadence.

Work through three questions:

• Understandability: Is the information about your product or service, including price, availability, and terms, current, complete, and consistent wherever it appears? 
• Verifiability: Do reviews, ratings, imagery, and actual customer experience support the claims you make?
• Actionability: Can an AI-assisted customer, or an authorized agent, move to the next step without confusion, manual workarounds, or surprise costs?

Then assign someone to be responsible for keeping the information accurate and for verifying that the experience aligns with the claims.

Appearing in an AI answer may put your brand in the running, but the decision still comes down to whether your offer, information, and customer experience stand up to comparison. What earns trust from consumers and the agents acting on their behalf is the boring stuff done well: accurate information, honest pricing, and fulfillment that works. 

As for my Tennessee trip? Gemini helped me narrow the list to a property 10 minutes away from TYS with a 9.2 customer rating. I booked directly through the hotel’s app for $125, all-in, including tax. The slowest step in the whole journey wasn’t AI. It was my husband’s sign-off, and no amount of GEO strategy speeds that up.

That’s the part marketers can’t lose sight of. AI may change how people discover and evaluate a brand, but the experience still has to reassure the decision-maker.

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