AI agents are the new buyer. You are still positioning to humans.

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Welcome to the 215th edition of The Growth Elements Newsletter. Every Monday and sometimes on Thursday, I write an essay on growth metrics & experiments and business case studies.

Today’s piece is for 8,000+ founders, operators, and leaders from businesses such as Shopify, Google, Hubspot, Zoho, Freshworks, Servcorp, Zomato, Postman, Razorpay and Zoom.

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If you run growth, your buyer changed and nobody sent a memo.

AI agents are now making the first cut on vendor shortlists, comparison sets, and product recommendations across B2B SaaS, B2C ecommerce, and DTC.

Your team is still building positioning for humans who never see your name.

[1] What happened

• Visa, Mastercard, OpenAI, and Anthropic all shipped agent commerce protocols in early 2026.

• ChatGPT Operator, Claude Computer Use, and Gemini agents now execute purchase research on behalf of users at scale.

• In B2B, procurement AI agents pre-filter vendor lists before a single human sees them.

• In B2C, shopping agents compare specs, price, and reviews and recommend a product before the buyer opens a tab.

• Industry data is consistent. 30 to 60 percent of pre-purchase research now happens inside an LLM.

• Shortlist appearance rates have dropped 40 to 60 percent year over year for brands not optimized for AI inclusion.

[2] Why it happened

• Agents parse structured data, schema, comparison logic, and citation signals.

• They do not read brand stories. Visual hierarchy is invisible to them. Your hero video might as well not exist.

• Your homepage was built for a CMO or a consumer scanning brand fit in 8 seconds.

• To an agent, that homepage is unreadable noise. You wrote for a buyer who is no longer first in line.

[3] What you do about it

• Build agent-readable assets. Add structured product data, FAQ schema, comparison tables, and entity-level content that maps your brand cleanly to category problems.

• Optimize for citation. Get your brand mentioned alongside competitors inside high-authority sources LLMs ingest fastest.

• Reddit, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, GitHub, and category-leading newsletters move the needle faster than your own blog.

• Rebuild attribution. Track agent-driven traffic and assisted conversions separately.

• The buyer journey now has an invisible first leg, and if you cannot measure it, you cannot defend the budget shift to your board.

Final Words

[1] Audit your top 10 pages this week for structured data, schema markup, and entity-level content. Most have none.

[2] Run your brand and your top three competitors through ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity as a buyer would. Compare what surfaces.

[3] Allocate 20 percent of next quarter's content and SEO budget to agent-optimized assets, citations, and platform-native distribution.

That's it for today's article! I hope you found this essay insightful.

Wishing you a productive week ahead!

I always appreciate you reading.

Thanks,
Chintankumar Maisuria