ASO: A new foundation in your content strategy
Becki Hoye
You've probably heard of SEO, and maybe AEO. But ASO (Agentic Search Optimization) is the next layer, and it's already here. It's about making sure your site is structured so AI agents can understand and act on your content.
Let's talk about three letters you're going to be hearing a lot more of: ASO.
We all know SEO. AEO has been creeping into the conversation too. But ASO (Agentic Search Optimization) is the newest layer, and this week it got a very loud endorsement.
Adobe just acquired SEMrush. In the announcement, SEMrush CMO Andrew Warden said something worth sitting with: "Chief marketing officers must now develop content and experiences that educate both humans and AI agents."
Both humans and AI agents.
That's not a prediction. He's describing right now.
SEO isn't dead. Google and organic search still matter. But AEO is already changing how strong content teams write, because when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, your brand either shows up in the answer or it doesn't. ASO takes that further. It's not about a human searching or even asking. It's about an AI agent evaluating, comparing, and making recommendations on someone's behalf, often without a human ever visiting your site. Adobe Analytics said AI traffic to U.S. retail sites is up 269% year over year. We see similar stats with our clients, where traffic from ChatGPT and other LLMs has grown significantly and is increasingly in the top 5 referrers. (Pro tip - Google Analytics doesn't always classify this well, so make sure to dig into referrers to understand this for your site).
So a website now has to do two things at once: be a genuinely great experience for the person using it, and be structured in a way that machines can understand. Most sites were built for one of those.
What makes this hard organizationally is that nobody really owns it yet. SEO teams understand structured data and schema but are often heads-down on execution. Product teams own the systems but aren't thinking about how an AI reads what they build, they're focused on the users and their experience. The skill that bridges all of this is living in the gap.
We've been spending a lot of time with clients working through this shift in their CMS and digital experience platforms. What keeps coming up are the things that make a strong foundation - clean content architecture, structured data, clear taxonomy, separation of content from presentation - are exactly what make a site legible to AI agents. Good bones matter more than ever.
The questions we keep coming back to with clients: How is your content structured? Can a machine understand what you sell, who you serve, why you're credible and (most importantly) your unique value? Does your site give AI something to work with, or does it leave it guessing?