Congratulations, The Robots Think Your Brand Is Ugly
For years, online business was relatively simple. You made a website. You bribed Google with keywords like a game show contestant desperately slapping giant red buttons. You collected reviews. You optimized conversions. And if all went well, customers found you and bought your little ergonomic garlic press or artisanal beef candle or whatever cursed object your Shopify store was emotionally attached to.
But now? Now we’ve entered a new phase of the internet. A phase so stupid it sounds like it was invented by a twelve-year-old hacking the Pentagon in a Disney Channel movie. Because suddenly marketers are whispering terrifying new phrases to each other in Slack channels like Cold War spies having a nervous breakdown: “Agent Visibility Index.”
“Machine Readability Score.”
“LLM Ranking Position.”
“Agent Conversion Attribution.”
Those are not terms from a business strategy meeting. Those are the names of failed Daft Punk songs. And yet apparently they matter now. A lot.
Because here’s the new problem: AI systems are becoming the thing that decides who exists online. Not humans. Not customers. Not even Google that bloated haunted accordion of a website. No, now your entire business depends on whether some silicon prediction blender decides you are worthy of being mentioned when someone asks: “What’s a good running shoe?” or “Which accounting software won’t make me fantasize about walking into the sea?” Because you can now have incredible SEO. Amazing reviews. Perfect conversion funnels. Customers who would literally die for your weighted blanket company. And still fail completely because the AI looked at your website and went, “Eh. Vibes are off.”
That is where we are now.
We spent twenty years optimizing for humans. And now the most important audience online is essentially an autistic refrigerator with infinite confidence. AI doesn’t care that your website is beautiful. In fact, it actively hates beauty. The more sophisticated your site is the more the machine reacts like an Excel spreadsheet developing seasonal depression.
“Oh, you built your homepage in JavaScript?”
“Fantastic. I can read none of it. Die.”
That’s what Machine Readability Score really means. Can the robot consume your website without getting indigestion? Because the real horror is this: humans increasingly won’t search for products anymore. They’ll ask AI what to buy. Which means if the AI recommends three brands and you are not one of them, you effectively become invisible. You are the digital equivalent of a restaurant hidden behind a waterfall inside another restaurant.
So what do you do? Read the field manual for making your brand AI-readable before the robots ignore you completely.
Simple. Stop building websites like they’re avant-garde art installations designed by a lactose-intolerant futurist with a podcast. Make your content painfully clear. Structured. Literal. Easy to quote. Easy to summarize. Easy to trust. Because AI loves clarity with the intensity of a divorced dad organizing extension cords. It wants specifications. Comparisons. Definitions. Product details. FAQ sections. Consistent information. Content that answers actual questions instead of sounding like a TED Talk written by a scented candle.
And here’s the genuinely annoying part: this is probably just the beginning. Today it’s Agent Visibility Index. Tomorrow your quarterly report will include sentences like: “Our toaster brand underperformed in conversational recommendation density.” At which point every marketer on Earth should legally be allowed to walk into the ocean fully clothed.
But until then there is one massive advantage available right now: most companies are still asleep. They’re obsessing over old metrics while AI systems quietly become the new front door to the internet. So the winners over the next few years will not necessarily be the loudest brands or the prettiest brands. They’ll be the brands the machines can understand fastest.
Which is a deeply humiliating sentence to write about human civilization. | 
