When Your Customer's AI Assistant Goes Shopping, Will It Find You?

Last week at SXSW, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince shared something that should keep every business owner up at night. And then, strangely, help them sleep better.

Cloudflare handles about 20% of all web traffic on the planet. They see everything. And what Prince is seeing right now is this: by 2027, bot traffic on the internet will exceed human traffic. More AI agents browsing the web than actual people.

That is not a prediction from a futurist trying to sell conference tickets. That is an observation from someone watching it happen in real time, right now, on his network.

Three of the Smartest Companies in the World Cannot Agree on What to Do About It

Prince used an example that stuck with me. Take Walmart, Amazon, and Target. Three massive retailers, unlimited resources, rooms full of brilliant strategists.

They have three completely different approaches to AI agents shopping on their sites.

Walmart says come one, come all. If your AI assistant wants to browse, buy, and transact on Walmart.com, the door is wide open.

Amazon is doing the opposite. They are suing companies to block AI agents from shopping on their platform. They just won an early ruling against Perplexity to stop exactly this.

Target is somewhere in between, allowing bots but only on their own site.

Prince's take? If you are confused about what this means for your business, you are in excellent company. Three of the most sophisticated companies on earth are placing three completely different bets because nobody knows exactly how this plays out.

But here is what we do know.

Your Brand Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

Prince made an observation that hit me hard. He said brands are shortcuts for humans to understand quality and value.

Think about that for a second. When you see a familiar logo, you do not have to research the company from scratch. The brand tells you something instantly. Quality. Price range. Experience. Trust.

AI agents do not need that shortcut.

When your customer's AI assistant goes looking for, say, a pair of pearl earrings or an engagement ring or a good restaurant for Saturday night, it does not see your logo. It does not feel your brand. It does not care about your Instagram aesthetic or your storefront on Main Street.

It evaluates. It looks for structured information. Product specifications. Verified quality signals. Unique expertise it can confirm. And it checks a thousand sources where a human would check five.

If your business has rich, detailed, accurate information online, the agent finds you. If you are relying on brand recognition and foot traffic alone, you are invisible.

The Swiss Cheese Opportunity

This was my favorite part of Prince's talk. He described the world's AI models as a giant block of Swiss cheese. They are a mathematical model of human knowledge, but they are also a map of where knowledge is missing. The holes in the cheese.

And the AI companies are eager to pay for content that fills those holes.

Here is what that means for your business. Generic information that exists everywhere has almost no value. But unique, specific, original expertise? That is the content AI companies and their agents are hungry for.

Prince owns a small local newspaper in Park City, Utah. He said this year, the paper may earn more from licensing content to AI companies than from digital advertising. Why? Because if you want to know the hot new restaurant in Park City or the current snow conditions, you need the Park Record. That information does not exist anywhere else.

The same principle applies to every business:

• A luxury jeweler who publishes detailed content about how diamonds are sourced from Antwerp, or how South Sea pearls are graded, or what makes a custom engagement ring worth the investment, that jeweler is filling holes in the cheese. A jeweler with a bare website and no content is invisible to agents.
• A veterinary practice that publishes treatment protocols and specialization details is findable. One that just lists an address and phone number is not.
• A consultant with deep, published expertise in a specific niche gets recommended. A generalist with a nice website gets skipped.

This Is a First-Mover Advantage, and the Window Is Open Right Now

Here is the part that should help you sleep better. Most businesses have not figured this out yet. Most of your competitors are still operating like it is 2019, optimizing for Google search results and hoping people click through to their website.

Meanwhile, Prince shared data showing that traffic from AI platforms is already thousands of times harder to earn than traditional Google traffic was a decade ago. Users are trusting the AI's answers and not clicking through to original sources. The shift is happening faster than anyone expected.

The businesses that build their "agent-readable identity" now, meaning structured product data, unique expertise content, and verified quality signals, will have a massive advantage as agentic commerce becomes the norm over the next 18 to 24 months.

The ones that wait will be playing catch-up in a game where the rules have already been written.

What I Am Telling My Clients

I work with high-net-worth business owners, mostly in luxury retail and professional services. Here is what I am advising right now:

Welcome the agents. Do not block bots from your site. Let them crawl, index, and learn about your business. The more your products and expertise are in the training data, the more likely an agent recommends you.

Get specific. Detailed product attributes, service descriptions, credentials, and sourcing stories are not just nice content. They are the structured data that agents parse when making recommendations.

Create content that only you can create. Your unique expertise, your proprietary process, your local knowledge. That is what fills the holes in the Swiss cheese. That is what has value.

Think beyond the click. The old model was create content, drive traffic, sell something. The new model is create unique expertise, get indexed by AI systems, become the recommended source. The customer may never visit your website directly and still buy from you because their agent found you.

Prince said something at the end of his talk that I keep coming back to. He said the most interesting question of the next five years is: what is the future business model of the internet?

Nobody has the answer yet. But the businesses building their agent-readable identity today are the ones that will be positioned to thrive regardless of how it shakes out.

The question is not whether your customers will start using AI agents to make buying decisions. They already are. The question is whether those agents can find you when they go looking.

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Tina Derby is the founder of Kristina Derby Consulting, where she helps high-net-worth business owners build their digital presence for the next era of commerce. She is based in Ocala, Florida.