AI Agents Are Your New Customer, But Can You Target And Grow Their Trust In Your Brand?

2026-06-16 · Source: Featured Blogs - Forrester · Field: Business & Management — Marketing, Branding & Advertising, Corporate Strategy & Leadership, E-commerce & Digital Commerce · Depth: Intermediate, quick

Summary

Marketing leaders must adapt strategies for AI agents, which act as new customers by retrieving and validating structured information for answer engines. To achieve "machine advantage," businesses need to move beyond traditional content visibility. This involves shaping an agent's context through a comprehensive content strategy that aligns messaging across earned, owned, and paid channels, recognizing that agents pull from diverse sources. Despite 69% of AI decision-makers believing genAI tools produce consistent outputs, answer engines generate varied responses. Furthermore, investing in robust information architecture is crucial, as agents require clear, sector-fluent content to minimize inference and hallucination, a priority for only 24% of B2B marketing decision-makers. Finally, building agent trust requires continuous content amplification, ensuring reliability and consistency across interactions, with 69% of digital business strategy decision-makers already piloting greater visibility on AI answer engines. Content governance becomes a technical necessity for relevance.

Key takeaway

For marketing leaders aiming to secure future brand relevance, your traditional content strategies must evolve beyond human-centric approaches. You should prioritize shaping AI agents' content context across all channels, invest in clear, sector-fluent information architecture, and implement continuous content governance. This ensures your brand narrative is accurately represented and trusted by agents, which are increasingly influencing consumer decisions and becoming a primary "customer" for your business.

Key insights

AI agents are a new customer segment requiring tailored content strategies and information architecture for brand trust.

Principles

• Agents retrieve content from diverse sources.
• Agent trust favors consistent, verifiable information.
• Information architecture is foundational for machine interaction.

Method

Marketing leaders must design content strategies to shape agent context across all channels, invest in fluent information architecture, and continuously amplify content to build agent trust.

In practice

• Align messaging across earned, owned, paid channels.
• Ensure content uses sector-specific terminology.
• Continuously update product data and verify facts.

Topics

• AI Agents
• Marketing Strategy
• Content Governance
• Information Architecture
• Brand Trust
• Machine Advantage

Best for: Marketing Professional, Consultant, Executive

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Featured Blogs - Forrester.