Most businesses think they've got AI figured out. Slap a chatbot on the website, sprinkle some keywords around for the AI crawlers, maybe write a few blog posts about "leveraging AI for growth." Job done, right?

Wrong. As AI becomes the dominant interface to the internet, surface-level optimisation won't cut it. You need to go much deeper.

What's actually happening is a fundamental rewiring of how businesses and customers connect. And the businesses that get this wrong won't just miss out on traffic: they'll become irrelevant.

At PaperKite, I've been exploring this evolution, most recently in a presentation "Working for the Bots: Customer Experience in the Age of AI" that I gave with Tom Hovey from Diagram. We've moved from designing for browsers to optimising for Google's algorithms, and now we're entering a new frontier. One where AI agents become the primary interface between businesses and customers, often bypassing traditional websites entirely.

This shift demands something more comprehensive than just optimising content for AI discovery (what many are calling Generative Engine Optimisation or GEO). It requires building infrastructure that enables your business to participate effectively in an AI-mediated ecosystem.

Beyond SEO and GEO: Why AI Engagement Optimisation Matters for Business

The digital landscape has evolved through three distinct phases:

PAST: We worked for browsers, making sure websites looked good in Netscape and Internet Explorer.

TODAY: We optimise for Google's algorithms, crafting content and structuring data to climb the search rankings.

TOMORROW: We're about to work for Google's AI bots and other AI gateways, as they increasingly mediate the relationship between businesses and customers.

But here's the critical distinction: optimising content for AI discovery is just scraping the surface. We need to think beyond GEO and consider the entire engagement architecture businesses need to build for meaningful transactions with AI systems. Perhaps this could be called AI Engagement Optimisation (AEO) - because we all need another TLA.

Think of it this way. If SEO and GEO are about being found. AEO is about being capable of doing business in an AI-first world. It's not enough for an AI to mention your business; you need it to facilitate transactions with you.

MCPs and AI-Native Infrastructure: Building for Connection

This is where technologies like Multimodal Content Processors (MCPs) become crucial. They're specialised interfaces that allow AI systems to understand and interact with your business across multiple forms of content and data simultaneously.

What makes MCPs particularly relevant right now is their adoption by major AI platforms. Yesterday, ChatGPT launched "Connectors," which allow businesses to create direct integrations with ChatGPT so the AI can perform actions within their systems. These connectors are built using MCP principles, demonstrating how this technology is becoming a standard for AI integration for businesses.

While tech giants are building MCPs to power their AI systems, smart businesses are building their own AI-native infrastructure. This might include MCPs, function-calling APIs, structured data schemas, or custom AI connectors that serve the same strategic purpose: enabling direct AI-business engagement.

Strategic Control in an AI Ecosystem

The concept of "Working for the Bots" presents two approaches: passive and active.

The passive approach is designing your content to be easily consumed by third-party AI systems. This leaves you vulnerable to disintermediation, where AI gateways might summarise your content but direct transactions elsewhere.

The active approach gives you strategic control by building your own infrastructure that treats AI gateways as participants in an ecosystem rather than threats. This means:

• Positioning your business as a trusted source that AI systems will prioritise

• Enabling direct transactions through AI rather than losing customers to competitors
  
  

• Maintaining visibility into how AI systems access and represent your offerings
  
  

• Designing interfaces that showcase your unique services in ways general-purpose AI systems might miss

This approach recognises that customer journeys will increasingly span multiple services orchestrated by AI agents. The businesses that thrive will be those that make themselves valuable participants in those journeys.

How to Build AI-Ready Business Infrastructure: Getting Started Guide

The good news? You don't need to rebuild everything overnight. Start with these foundational steps:

• Audit your current digital transactions. Which ones would benefit most from AI mediation? Look specifically for transactions that could be easily modularised for AI-mediated interactions.

• Map your data architecture. Is it structured in a way that AI can easily interpret? Consider implementing Schema.org markup, JSON-LD, or other structured data formats. These translate human-centric content into semantically rich language that AI agents can understand, act upon, and interconnect. In a future where AI is the dominant interface to the internet, such technologies are no longer “nice to have”,  they’re the price of admission.

• Explore AI-native technologies. Research MCPs, function-calling APIs, and other technologies that enable direct AI-business integration. ChatGPT's new Connectors provide a concrete example.

• Prototype simple API endpoints designed specifically for AI consumption. Start with focused use cases like product discovery, appointment booking, or status checking functions.

The businesses that start this journey now will have an insurmountable advantage as AI adoption accelerates.

Conclusion

We've seen this movie before. The businesses that dismissed websites as a fad in the '90s or ignored mobile optimisation in the 2010s paid a heavy price. The AI transition will be no different, except it's happening much faster.

The evolution from working for browsers to working for algorithms to working for AI is inevitable. But there's a critical choice in how we approach this transition. We can passively let AI gateways dictate how our businesses operate, or we can actively shape how we participate in this new ecosystem.

AEO isn't just about optimising content for chatbots to find. It's about reimagining your entire business model for an economy where AI agents are increasingly the primary interface to customers. The question isn't whether your business needs to adapt. It's how quickly you can build the interfaces that make you an indispensable player in the AI ecosystem.

The future isn't about working for the bots. It's about making the bots work with you.

Because let's face it: the businesses that see this shift as just another channel to optimise are about to get left behind. The real opportunity isn't implementing AI within your existing business model. It's becoming an integral part of how AI delivers value to users, regardless of which AI gateway they choose to use.