---
id: "prereq-seo-mechanics-d6"
type: "prereq"
source_timestamps: ["¶3", "§ [ Stage 3 ] Make Other AI Agents Choose Your Brand"]
tags: ["marketing-fundamentals"]
related: ["concept-share-of-model", "concept-strategic-text-sequence", "concept-llms-txt"]
reason: "Provides the necessary contrast to understand why 'Share of Model' requires different tactics than 'Share of Search'."
sources: ["agentic"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-agentic"
originDay: 6
articleStem: "hbr-ext-18-preparing-brand-agentic-ai"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/03/preparing-your-brand-for-agentic-ai"
sourceTitle: "Preparing Your Brand for Agentic AI"
---
# Traditional SEO Mechanics

**Prerequisite.** The authors contrast 'optimizing for AI' with the past two decades of 'optimizing keyword strategies.' A baseline understanding of how traditional search engines crawl, index, and rank human-readable content is necessary to grasp why techniques like [[concept-strategic-text-sequence]] or [[concept-llms-txt]] represent a paradigm shift.

**Why it matters.** It provides the contrast needed to understand why [[concept-share-of-model]] requires different tactics than 'share of search.'

**Enrichment nuance.** A skeptical reading holds that much 'agentic AI optimization' repackages long-standing content-quality work (structured content, entity clarity, citations, authoritative pages) — i.e., LLM visibility is partly downstream of general web authority, not a wholly new discipline.