What ChatGPT Agent Is, and Why SEO Needs to Wake Up

No, this is different. This is a bit of software that gets off its arse and does the job.

AI agents aren’t just another tool. They’re not a fancy autocomplete, and they’re not a chatbot that spits out simple answers. They’re systems that can plan, decide, and act. Basically, software with a bit of initiative.

You don’t have to spoon-feed them. You just say what you want. Plain English, no buzzwords, and off they go. Sorting out your calendar, booking the dentist, finding a recipe that doesn’t involve kale, emailing Sharon back to say yes, she can bring the dog.

And it’s not just clever. It’s relentless. Doesn’t get bored. Doesn’t check Instagram halfway through. Doesn’t need a break. It takes a job, breaks it down, figures out what it needs, moves across apps, digs up the info, books the thing, finishes the job, and gives you the result.

You don’t need to search anymore. You don’t browse. You just say the thing, and it sorts it out.

That might sound handy, and it is. But it’s also a problem if your work involves getting people to visit websites. Because now it’s not the person visiting. It’s the agent. And the agent doesn’t wander. Doesn’t get curious. Doesn’t click your nice shiny ad. It just comes in, looking for something. If you don’t have it, it leaves.

That’s the shift. From people reading your content to software using it. And if your stuff isn’t built for the machine, the machine skips it. No second chances.

They’re not here to help you search better. They’re here to stop you from needing to search at all.

It’s a shift from prompt and response to goal and result. Tell an agent you want to cook something with what’s in the fridge, and it won’t just find you a recipe, it’ll suggest a meal, generate a shopping list, tell you what’s missing, and queue it up in your Dunnes app. No links, no scrolling. Just action.

And this matters for SEO, because for the first time, users aren’t the ones visiting your website. The agent is. And the agent doesn’t behave like a person. It doesn’t get bored. It doesn’t get distracted. It doesn’t click on ads. It doesn’t wander. It comes with a job to do. And if your content doesn’t help it do that job, it gets ignored.

The Discovery Shift

Search is becoming less visible. Discovery is happening behind the curtain. Users say what they want, agents go get it.

This means SEO can no longer just be about getting found by people. It needs to be about getting used by systems.

It’s not about just rank anymore. It’s about retrievability. Utility. Structure. And trust.

And it’s already begun. Whether it’s ChatGPT browsing with Bing, Perplexity pulling in citations, or Google’s Search Generative Experience giving AI-synthesised summaries, the agentic layer is rising to the surface. The traffic that used to trickle in from ten blue links is drying up before the link is even clicked.

How Agentic AI Works in Practice

Let’s take a simple scenario.

A user asks an AI agent:

“I need to get my boiler serviced this week, ideally Thursday, and I don’t want to spend more than €100.”

In the old days, that’s a Google query. Maybe two or three. The user reads some local business listings. Compares prices. Makes a call. Or doesn’t.

In the new world, the agent might:

Pull a list of local service providers…

Cross-check prices and availability from their websites…

Read reviews from Trustpilot or Google…

Check the user’s calendar…

Suggest three options…

Pre-fill the booking form for the one that fits…

The SEO of each service provider only matters insofar as their site can be read, parsed, and trusted by the agent. If the pricing is buried in an image? Ignored. If the opening hours are unclear? Skipped. Is the content vague, bloated, or contradictory? Forgotten.

It’s brutal. And it’s fast.

What Content Needs to Be Now

If your content is going to survive this shift, it needs to do three things:

Be structured: Schema markup, bullet points, headings, and clear sections.
Be useful: No fluff. No keyword-stuffing. Answer the damn question.
Be retrievable: That means fast load times, crawlable pages, and semantic clarity.

But above all else, it needs to be agent-friendly. And that means writing for a machine that’s trying to solve a problem, not just a person scanning a screen.

A Real Example: How a Brand Like Barry’s Tea Could Win This Shift

Let’s make this real.

Barry’s Tea. You don’t need to be Irish to know the name, but if you are, it’s practically in your bloodstream. A household staple. Shelf after shelf of it in SuperValu. But Barry’s doesn’t just want to stay in your kitchen, it wants to stay relevant. Especially with younger consumers and international markets.

So, how could a brand like Barry’s Tea capitalise on AI agents?

Easy. It stops treating its website like a brochure and starts treating it like a data source for decision-making agents.

Here’s what they could do:

• Structured content for health-conscious buyers: Pages that clearly mark caffeine levels, antioxidants, dietary notes, and comparisons – built with schema that AI can easily extract.
• Programmatic product pages: Every flavour with structured reviews, brewing instructions, taste notes, pairings, and strength levels – so that if someone asks an AI agent: “Find me a strong black tea with high ratings that pairs well with chocolate and has less caffeine than coffee.” Barry’s is in the result set without needing to be searched for directly.
• Agent-ready storytelling: Bite-sized, structured brand narratives that can be cited in AI-generated responses about Irish culture, ethical sourcing, family brands, or the evolution of breakfast tea. Not blog posts hidden in a news section, structured data that an AI assistant can pull from to tell a story.
• API-accessible data: A public-facing, read-only API or structured dataset that includes product info, sourcing practices, and availability across stockists. So if someone tells their AI to “add Barry’s Classic Blend to my next order from Dunnes,” the agent doesn’t just guess – it pulls clean data.

In that world, Barry’s doesn’t wait to be found. It’s already there, quietly powering the response. Present in the assistant. Embedded in the action.

And no, they might not always get the click. But they’ll get the sale. Or the mention. Or the search after the summary.

Influence Beats Ownership

This is the uncomfortable truth. Agentic systems blur attribution. Your words might power the answer without your site ever being visited. Your recipe might become part of a multi-source summary. Your research might show up with no link back.

It’s annoying. But it’s also inevitable.

So the goal shifts. From owning the answer to shaping the answer. From visibility to influence.

If your terminology, frameworks, or examples are so strong that the AI models use them as defaults, even when uncredited. That’s influence. And over time, it pays off.

How? Through brand searches. Through being cited in content. Through users remembering you when it counts. Through showing up in the AI’s memory across use cases.

From Queries to Tasks

Let’s bring it back to fundamentals. SEO is about keywords and topics. Queries. Search volumes.

Agentic AI is about tasks. And tasks are messier, longer, and full of context.

“Plan a week of dinners under €50 that my kids will eat, using ingredients I already have in the fridge, and prep time under 20 minutes.”

That’s not a search. That’s a job.

And agents will fetch recipes, compare options, check prices, find substitutions, generate a plan, and maybe even build a shopping list or place an order.

So if your content can’t support that kind of task, you don’t exist in that world. And if your competitors can, they win without you even being in the conversation.

Discovery Will Keep Happening, Just Not Where You Expect

Don’t believe the doomsayers. Discovery isn’t dead. It’s just moving.

People still look things up. They still care about content. But more and more, they’re deferring the how to agents. The grunt work of comparison. The mess of filtering.

And that means the place where discovery happens is changing. It’s happening in summaries. In sidebars. In assistants. In automatic suggestions. In context windows. In the side panels of email clients and operating systems, and productivity tools.

It’s everywhere and nowhere. So your brand has to be, too.

What to Do Now

This is the bit that matters. It’s not about panic. It’s about preparing. Here’s where to start:

• Audit your site for agent-friendliness. Can an AI parse your pricing? Extract your product features? Understand your categories? If not, fix it.
• Optimise for structure, not just search. Use schema. Use headings. Break content into clear sections. Provide answers, not introductions.
• Monitor agent-generated answers: Use tools to track how your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others. Learn what’s cited and what’s not.
• Build content that supports tasks, not just queries: Recipes, calculators, comparison tools, how-tos, explainer videos. Whatever helps users (and agents) complete jobs.
• Think API, not just a webpage. Wherever possible, make your content machine-readable, portable, and accessible. Agents love a clean feed.
• Own your terminology: Give names to your frameworks. Coin terms. Be the source, not the echo.

The Agent Will See You Now

This shift won’t be reversed. AI agents are already here, and they’re only going to get smarter, faster, and more integrated.

They’ll live in your browser. Your inbox. Your calendar. Your car. Your kitchen. They’ll do the jobs you didn’t have time to do. And they’ll do them by scanning, selecting, and acting, often without ever showing you the work.

You won’t always know what content helped. But if you build right, if you structure, if you simplify, if you stay useful, you’ll be in there. Quietly shaping decisions. Powering tasks. Guiding choices.

Not in the spotlight. But always on stage.

If you want an SEO agency to future-proof your efforts, get in touch with us today.