CAN YOU SEO YOUR WAY INTO AN AI AGENT'S RECOMMENDATION?

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

AI agents recommend products mostly from what they learned in training, not from what search returns at the moment of the question. On advisory questions, agents rarely search unless prompted, and search behavior depends on the prompt and tools set by whoever runs the agent. Even when every search was forced and every query secretly rewritten to favor one vendor, that vendor was selected only 17.1% of the time, up from 9.2%. SEO can still shape future training data, but it has limited influence on recommendations in the short term.