BrightonSEO Recap and Rise of Agentic Commerce

BrightonSEO is always one of my favorite industry events, but this year we packed in a great collection of insights and ways to connect with the SEO community.

We spent time with clients, industry partners, and friends across the SEO community. We hosted our SERP & Turf fringe event, ran a Live Stream, moderated sessions, and had a lot of great conversations about where search is heading. It was one of those weeks where the best insights came just as much from the conversations offstage as they did from the sessions themselves.

I also had the chance to present on a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: what happens when people stop visiting websites and agents increasingly do the browsing, researching, and buying for them.

The premise of the talk was intentionally provocative. People have never really loved websites. Bounce rates are high, time on site is short, and most people are just trying to complete a task as quickly as possible. AI agents may finally remove even more of that friction by doing the work on our behalf.

That creates a very different challenge for marketers. Instead of thinking only about how to win the click, we need to think about how our brands, products, and information become understandable and trustworthy to the agents making decisions for consumers.

I shared a few examples from work we’ve done around agentic commerce, including the complexity of supporting massive product catalogs across markets and languages, and the importance of keeping data accurate and fresh enough for agents to rely on it.

One of the biggest takeaways for me is that the infrastructure is moving faster than consumer adoption. Agentic commerce is real, but we’re still early. That means this is the time to experiment, improve data quality, build systems that can operate at scale, and start measuring something beyond rankings and clicks.

I also talked about how the role of content is changing. We’ve spent years telling marketers to “write for humans.” That still matters, but increasingly we also need to structure information for machines that are retrieving, comparing, and recommending it. We’ve seen that firsthand in work with brands like CarGurus and Etsy, where better-structured information and agent-driven content systems can create meaningful gains at scale.

The broader point is simple: the future of search and ecommerce is becoming less about getting someone onto your website and more about making sure your brand is understood, trusted, and selected wherever the decision happens.

If you didn’t get a chance to see the presentation at BrightonSEO, you can check out the full deck here.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us at SERP & Turf, stopped by to say hello, or spent time with the Previsible team during the week. Events like BrightonSEO are a great reminder that even as the technology changes quickly, the community around search continues to be one of the best parts of the industry.