---
id: "concept-ai-agent-marketing-aam"
type: "concept"
source_timestamps: ["§ AI Agent Optimization (AAO) vs. Search-Engine Optimization (SEO)"]
tags: ["marketing-strategy", "future-disciplines"]
related: ["concept-ai-agent-optimization-aao", "entity-poe"]
definition: "A hypothesized future marketing discipline, analogous to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), focused on promoting products across multiple, interchangeable AI agent platforms."
speakers: ["Jur Gaarlandt", "Wesley Korver", "Nathan Furr", "Andrew Shipilov"]
sources: ["geo"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-geo"
originDay: 3
articleStem: "hbr-cl-92-ai-agents-changing-shopping"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2025/02/ai-agents-are-changing-how-people-shop-heres-what-that-means-for-brands"
sourceTitle: "AI Agents Are Changing How People Shop. Here’s What That Means for Brands."
---
# AI Agent Marketing (AAM)

While [[concept-ai-agent-optimization-aao]] is the *organic* side of adapting to AI agents, **AI Agent Marketing (AAM)** represents the paid or strategic equivalent of SEM (see [[prereq-seo-and-sem]]).

The authors introduce AAM to address the complexity of a **fragmented AI landscape**. Because AI-agent aggregators like [[entity-poe]] make it trivial for users to switch between underlying models (ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Perplexity), retailers and brands will not know which specific agent a given customer is using. Therefore, AAM will require marketers to learn how to optimize and market their offerings to *multiple AI agents simultaneously*, ensuring their value proposition is recognized regardless of the specific LLM or agent architecture processing the consumer's query.

The open, unresolved mechanics of executing AAM are captured in [[question-execution-of-aam]].

**Enrichment context:** Adjacent "commerce protocol" discussions describe agent-initiated purchases and paid placement mechanisms that would eventually give AAM concrete tooling — e.g., ad-tech systems that inject sponsored preferences into an agent's context window. Today these do not exist as mature products, so AAM remains the most *speculative* of the source's four core ideas.


## Related across articles
- [[concept-ai-agent-optimization-aao]]
- [[concept-answer-engine-optimization]]