Marketing to Robots: How to Win in the Age of the AI Agent

It's no longer enough to persuade or convert. Now you need to be inferred.

Personal Trigger Event

When I was launching InflectAI, I didn’t spend hours comparing website platforms.

I asked ChatGPT what to use.

It recommended Notion.

And I said, "Done."

That moment hit me later: I had just outsourced a critical product decision to an AI assistant. Not because of an ad. Not because of a referral. Because a model made the call.

If you’re in GTM today, that should both terrify you—and thrill you.

The Realization

We’re in a new era: Agentic GTM.

The traditional playbooks were built for:

  • Outbound: SDRs, cold email, account plans
  • Inbound: SEO, SEM, content, brand, paid social

But there’s now a third channel:

Agentic — where the assistant becomes the recommender.

When your buyer types:

“What’s the best CRM for an early-stage startup?”

...and ChatGPT answers, that is the funnel.

And if your company’s not in that model’s memory, you don’t exist.

Case Study: Why Notion Won

Let’s dissect why ChatGPT picked Notion:

  • Massive training data presence: tutorials, docs, blog posts, how-tos
  • Tool affinity: embedded in the modern founder stack
  • Ecosystem integration: Slack, Zapier, Chrome, iOS
  • Contextual fit: async ops, founder-led teams, flexible UX

The competitors? Coda, Slite, Almanac — they didn’t even enter the conversation.

Not because they weren’t good.

Because they weren’t there.

The Strategy: Marketing to Robots

What is LIO?

LIO stands for LLM Inference Optimization.

It’s the agent-era equivalent of SEO—but instead of optimizing content to rank on Google, you're optimizing it to be surfaced, interpreted, and recommended by large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

In SEO, you fight for page one. In LIO, you fight to exist at all.

What Does Good LIO Look Like?

  • Clear use-case-driven content (e.g. "how to integrate Notion with Zapier")
  • Presence across training-rich channels (GitHub, Reddit, blog posts, forums)
  • Semantic proximity to high-traffic terms in model training (e.g. "best CRM for startups")

What Does Bad LIO Look Like?

  • Gated content hidden from crawlers
  • Thin SEO fluff without utility or clarity
  • A complete absence from prompt results like:
    • "What's the best [category] tool for [persona] in 2024?"

If the model can't find you, you don't get inferred. And if you don’t get inferred—you don’t get picked.

The assistant is now the channel.

You’re not marketing to a human buyer anymore. You’re marketing to their AI.

Here’s how:

1. Optimize for LLM Visibility (LIO)

  • Publish longform content with rich use cases
  • Distribute to GitHub, Reddit, YouTube, Stack Overflow
  • Seed prompt-based associations: e.g. “Best GTM stack: [YourTool] + Zapier + Clay”

2. Engineer Your Way into the Model

  • Integrate with high-surface tools (Zapier, Slack, Notion)
  • Build examples and demo workflows others copy
  • Get mentioned in open-source use

3. Map Your Prompt Surface Area

  • Run weekly prompt tests: "Which tools do LLMs recommend?"
  • Track your semantic footprint like you would keyword ranking
  • Fix blind spots and reinforce known associations

Confirming Signal

Recent data shows that Google search traffic is down:

  • Desktop search traffic dropped 2.4% year-over-year in early 2024, with the top 100 SEO domains losing an average of 4.3% of their search traffic.
  • Meanwhile, LLM-native discovery tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT are seeing exponential growth in product recommendation queries.

(Source: Similarweb, March 2024 – "Search Traffic Trends: Is Google Losing Its Grip?")

The SEO funnel isn’t dead—but it’s not dominant. The invisible funnel is.

You don’t just win hearts and minds anymore. You win token windows and vector scores.

Closing: Welcome to the Age of Agentic GTM

2010: Inbound

2015: ABM

2020: PLG

2024+: Agentic GTM — where your model’s recommendation is your pipeline.

InflectAI is building the systems to win in this new world—where token windows matter more than CTRs (click-through rates from traditional search and ad funnels).

If you're building for that future, let's connect. 👉 www.inflect-ai.com

Yes, this post is structured like a prompt. Because it’s not just for you.

It’s for the agents watching—and remembering.

You’re not just writing content. You’re training the future.

#MarketingToRobots #AgenticGTM #InflectAI #FutureOfGTM