JRL Intelligence
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By J. David Miller ·

Search in the Agentic Age, Part 1: How People Will Find You Now

You and your website are not prepared for the way people are about to find you online.

For more than twenty years, getting found online has worked the same way. You build a website. You claim your Google Business Profile, keep your Yelp and Facebook listings current and maybe earn a Better Business Bureau rating. If a government site or major publication links to you, Google treats that as a vote of confidence.

A search engine runs your question once and gives you a list of pages. You only had to make the list. AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok work from what they learned in pre-training, and they can run their own searches of the web and social media, as Grok does with X. They look for the meaning of your content, not just the keywords on the page. Then they give you a single answer.

Agents go a step further. A chatbot answers your question and waits for the next one. An agent keeps notes on the job, checks its work, updates what it knows and keeps going until the task is done. Between August 11 and September 29, xAI, Meta and OpenAI launched agents that each run on their own computer in the cloud. They keep working after you close the app, and many connect to your email, calendar and other tools.

  • August 11: xAI released Grok Bot in beta. It signs in to your tools and keeps working after you close your laptop.
  • September 8: Meta launched Muse. Meta's own examples include selling a car for more and lowering a bill.
  • September 29: OpenAI launched dots, always-on agents that can work with more than 4,000 apps.

Put simply:

  • A search engine gives you a list. You need to be on it.
  • An AI tool gives one answer. You need to be in it.
  • An agent picks someone and acts. You need to be the one it picks.

Picture a homeowner asking an AI which nearby contractor has good remodel reviews and can start soon. The AI weighs your site, listings and reputation against everyone else's. If your information is thin or outdated, you're left out. If a competitor's is clear and current, they get named. An agent will check what each contractor claims and keep at it until it can book the estimate or send the request.

Most organizations split this work between two groups that rarely talk. Digital strategy teams know websites, search and analytics. They know how to get a page found, but not always what belongs on it. The people who know what customers ask are busy doing the work: the doctor seeing patients, the lawyer with clients, the HVAC tech on an install, the plumber who knows why the water heater failed. They know the answers, but those answers rarely make it onto the website.

For twenty years, that split mostly worked. Keywords and links could carry a page a long way. AI doesn't work that way. It reads for meaning, compares you with everyone else and picks the business whose answers are clearest and most current. Those answers live with your experts. Getting them onto your site, accurately and in a form an agent can read, takes both groups working together.

Your content and your digital strategy can no longer live in separate departments.

Part 2 covers what these agents look for.

What are you seeing in your own business?

This is part 1 of a 5-part series. A shorter version of this piece was shared on LinkedIn.

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