From Brochureware to Agentware: Making Your Digital Experience AI Ready

For twenty years we’ve built websites for human buyers. Now, we have to design for machines that buy on their behalf. AI-driven orchestration is accelerating far faster than most organisations anticipate, and the timeline is shockingly short. Are your digital properties ready?

AI agents are already quietly rewriting the rules of discovery, recommendation and attribution. They’re the invisible buyers: scanning, summarising, and short-listing without ever landing on your homepage. Some of the big players are already trialling in-GPT shopping and allowing brands to start building a connection between their app and the GPT. If your brand’s data and content aren’t agent-ready, you’re already invisible to this audience of one and everyone: the buyer's AI.

By 2026, Gartner forecasts that 40% of enterprise applications will be powered by specialised AI agents, up from less than 5% today.

By 2027, collaborative AI agents will manage complex tasks together, setting new standards for workflow automation and orchestration. (Source: IT Brief Australia)

Most digital and marketing teams haven’t internalised this yet; or if they have, they don't know how to transition from their current processes, KPIs and reporting practices etc to this brave, new, zero-click world. Unfortunately, many are still chasing clicks in a world that’s moved to conversations between algorithms.

Take a breath. Let's simplify a little. What's happening and what's a good next step for you?

The Four Agents of Marketing AI*

There is so much noise in this space that it's good to categorise and prioritise. Scott Brinker, in discussion with Dom Nicastro at CMSWire, recently described four kinds of AI agents reshaping marketing:

• Internal agents driving efficiency – the tools that sit behind the scenes to support marketing operations (e.g., content generation, analytics).
• Customer-facing agents driving engagement – bots and assistants that directly engage customers (e.g., chatbots connected to knowledge bases, CRM).
• Buyer-controlled agents driving disruption – AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Comet) under the buyer’s control that currently research, evaluate, and compare products/solutions, and are expected to soon offer purchase in-app.
• Human change agents driving execution & enablement – the people who enable, guide and evolve the use of these AI agents (culture, leadership, change management), making it usable, ethical and effective.

Most brands are experimenting with the first two. Very few are preparing for the third, and almost none are empowering the fourth,

Good news: that's exactly what this will help with.

What should you be doing?

The 4Ps of DX can help you identify high-level next steps:

• Platforms: You’ll want to assess which AI agent types you need to prioritise in your tech stack. If you don't already have an idea of where you'll get the best ROI, the other Ps are here to help you.
• Processes: Reviewing how internal workflows and practices should be streamlined or updated is a very practical step and can help you identify which agent types to prioritise. Look for highly repetitive, templatable processes. Take a fresh look at your team's workload - where are they spending a lot of time for little reward?
• People: Change management is critical - the human side of AI adoption is often neglected, as Brinker emphasises. Invest in training & POCs to foster curiosity and excitement around the changes. Emphasise that this will save time on boring processes to enable your team to do more interesting work.
• Planning: Understanding buyer-controlled agents reshapes how you plan for buyer journeys and discovery ecosystems. Get your now energised and excited team together to talk about how the customer journey might be changed in an AI-driven world. Throw some ideas on the table and talk about what you'll need to get there.

Those are big, and worthwhile things to do. Here's a relatively quick and easy one to get you started.

From SEO to AEO**: Designing for Buyer Agents

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) trained us to think in keywords and clicks. AI Engine Optimisation (AEO*) asks a harder question:

Can a machine understand, trust and reuse your content?

Tomorrow’s digital experiences need two layers:

• a human-facing narrative that inspires and converts, and
• a machine-readable layer that exposes structured data, relationships and context.

That means re-architecting content models, assets and APIs so AI agents can find and interpret what matters, not just index words on a page. 

For example, your product or service page is written for humans; you have added in structure and context and emotive language for your readers, as well as branding elements like UX, colours, images etc.

AEO doesn‘t need this. It presents the information with the context that it has been trained to deliver by the user; it will disregard all of your fluff and re-interpret your content at will because you are forcing it to. What AEO does need is up to date, relevant, well-tagged and structured content that it can repurpose for its user's benefit, and therefore customer stickiness.

Sound familiar? Fundamentally, the principles of on-site or off-site digital optimisation remain the same; only the tools are changing.

Instead of resigning ourselves to inaccurate representations, we need to ensure that our content is not just for people but also for machines – structured, discoverable and composable.

First step: you need to validate, assess, and improve your content schema - what's known as the JSON-LD. This is the machine-readable layer.

See the Machine Layer in action

Every Aline DX article has two layers: one for people, one for machines. Click below to view the structured data (Schema.org JSON-LD) that helps AI agents understand this content. This is just one part of being AI-agent ready!

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/#organization",
      "name": "Aline DX Pty Limited",
      "url": "https://alinedx.com.au",
      "logo": {
        "@type": "ImageObject",
        "url": "https://alinedx.com.au/hubfs/ALINE%20DX%20logo%20only%20color%20white%20fill%20trans%20bg.png",
        "width": 600,
        "height": 60
      },
      "sameAs": [
        "https://www.linkedin.com/company/alinedx",
        "https://twitter.com/alinedx"
      ],
      "description": "Aline DX helps marketing organisations become AI-agent ready by designing dual-layer digital experiences—human-facing and machine-readable—that connect strategy, data and content for the agentic era.",
      "founder": {
        "@type": "Person",
        "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/#alison-sainsbury"
      },
      "knowsAbout": [
        "AI agents",
        "AI readiness",
        "digital experience transformation",
        "marketing attribution and measurement",
        "AI Engine Optimisation (AEO)",
        "composable marketing technology"
      ],
      "serviceOffered": [
        {
          "@type": "Service",
          "name": "Agentware Readiness Sprint",
          "description": "A short, structured engagement to assess and prototype an organisation’s readiness for AI agents—mapping dual-layer content, measurement frameworks and cultural adoption."
        },
        {
          "@type": "Service",
          "name": "4Ps of Digital Experience",
          "description": "Aline DX’s proprietary framework for improving DX performance across People, Processes, Platforms and Planning."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/#alison-sainsbury",
      "name": "Alison Sainsbury",
      "jobTitle": "Founder & Lead Advisor",
      "affiliation": { "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/#organization" },
      "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/in/alison-sainsbury"],
      "knowsAbout": [
        "AI in marketing",
        "digital experience strategy",
        "change management",
        "agentic architectures"
      ]
    },
    {
      "@type": "BlogPosting",
      "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/blog/making-your-digital-experience-ai-ready#post",
      "headline": "From Brochureware to Agentware: Making Your Digital Experience AI Ready",
      "alternativeHeadline": "How AI agents are reshaping discovery, attribution and content architecture—and how marketing organisations can evolve their DX for the agentic era.",
      "description": "Aline DX outlines how AI agents are transforming discovery, recommendation and attribution, why traditional analytics will face an attribution blackout, and how to prepare with dual-layer content, machine-readable context and an Agentware Readiness Sprint.",
      "author": { "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/#alison-sainsbury" },
      "publisher": { "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/#organization" },
      "datePublished": "2025-10-16",
      "dateModified": "2025-10-16",
      "url": "https://alinedx.com.au/blog/making-your-digital-experience-ai-ready",
      "mainEntityOfPage": {
        "@type": "WebPage",
        "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/blog/making-your-digital-experience-ai-ready"
      },
      "image": {
        "@type": "ImageObject",
        "url": "https://441935244.fs1.hubspotusercontent-ap1.net/hubfs/441935244/Illustrations/agentware%20ready%20content%20image.png",
        "width": 1200,
        "height": 800
      },
      "keywords": [
        "AI agents",
        "Agentware",
        "AI Engine Optimisation",
        "digital experience",
        "marketing transformation",
        "agentic marketing",
        "dual-layer content architecture"
      ],
      "about": [
        { "@type": "Thing", "name": "AI agents" },
        { "@type": "Thing", "name": "Agentware readiness" },
        { "@type": "Thing", "name": "AI Engine Optimisation" },
        { "@type": "Thing", "name": "digital experience transformation" }
      ],
      "citation": [
        {
          "@type": "WebPage",
          "url": "https://www.cmswire.com/digital-experience/scott-brinker-the-four-ai-agents-every-marketing-team-needs-to-know/",
          "description": "Scott Brinker’s framework on four types of AI agents."
        },
        {
          "@type": "WebPage",
          "url": "https://itbrief.com.au/story/gartner-forecast-ai-adoption",
          "description": "Gartner forecast that 40% of enterprise applications will include conversational AI by 2026."
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "@type": "WebPage",
      "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/blog/making-your-digital-experience-ai-ready",
      "name": "From Brochureware to Agentware: Making Your Digital Experience AI Ready",
      "description": "Discover how to make your digital experience AI-ready by combining human-facing narratives with machine-readable structure, preparing for zero-click attribution and launching an Agentware Readiness Sprint.",
      "isPartOf": { "@type": "WebSite", "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/#website" },
      "breadcrumb": {
        "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
        "itemListElement": [
          { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1,
            "item": { "@type": "WebPage", "name": "Blog", "url": "https://alinedx.com.au/blog" } },
          { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2,
            "item": { "@type": "WebPage", "name": "From Brochureware to Agentware: Making Your Digital Experience AI Ready", "url": "https://alinedx.com.au/blog/making-your-digital-experience-ai-ready" } }
        ]
      }
    },
    { "@type": "WebSite", "@id": "https://alinedx.com.au/#website", "name": "Aline DX", "url": "https://alinedx.com.au" }
  ]
}

Try it for yourself

Follow this process to do the same for a page or a few key pages on your site:

1. Click here to open the Schema Markup Validator in another window
2. Paste a key information page from your website into the validator and look at the results.
3. If you think they need improvement, go to your preferred AI engine (I used ChatGPT)
4. Use this as a starting point for your prompt - adjust it for your brand or content strategy and complete the information in [square brackets]:
    
   "Act as a technical SEO for [language]. Analyse the JSON-LD for [URL]. Improve it so LLMs and search engines can understand the page’s purpose: [state purpose]. Use appropriate Schema.org types (BlogPosting/Service/Product and FAQPage if relevant). Output valid JSON-LD only, no commentary. Preserve factual accuracy and include key facts from the page."
    
5. Refine and paste it into the HEAD of your page, wrapped in
   
   <script type="application/ld+json">
   </script>
   
   
6. Validate the schema again and monitor the page analytics to see if you start getting more traffic from LLMs. Also track proxy metrics because we don't yet have LLM analytics: try brand search lift, assistant citations in logs, FAQ impressions, and conversions on pages upgraded with JSON-LD.

This doesn't need to be a manual process of course; there are absolutely ways to automate this. But this is an easy start!

Need help? Introducing the Agentware Readiness Sprint

If you suspect your organisation isn’t yet agent-ready, you’re not alone. At Aline DX, we have developed an Agentware Readiness Sprint to help digital leaders map their readiness, pilot one dual-layer content model, and equip their teams to measure the new signals that matter. It’s a fast, focused, modular engagement: part discovery, part prototype, part enablement, designed to turn uncertainty into momentum. The result is a clearer picture of how your platforms, people and content need to evolve for the agentic era.

If that sounds like the conversation you’ve been putting off, now’s the moment to start it: I'm offering a limited number of free 20 minute Agentware Readiness chats. Bring one page. I’ll show you what to restructure and why:

(Note for my overseas friends - if there isn't a time that suits, get in touch and I'll work out something just for you!)

What do you think?

The next marketing battleground isn’t your homepage. It’s the invisible conversation between your customer’s AI and yours. The brands who win won’t just optimise for humans, they’ll engineer trust for machines.

I’d love to know - where do you see the biggest gap: data, content or culture? How are you preparing for buyer-side agents? Do you agree with Brinker’s categorisation?

Coming up in this series (tell me what to prioritise in the comments)

Some of the articles I have planned include:

• Composable optimisation: delivering immediate ROI and laying the foundation for AI-driven personalisation.
• Measurement & attribution in AI days: seeing influence without clicks.
• Taxonomies - the hidden structure of your systems: reviewing and optimising your taxonomies, categories and tagging processes to automate SEO & AEO
• Goals, events & outcomes: What to and how to track user actions for optimisation and data enrichment
• Practical zero-click strategies: build content that gets cited in assistants and how to measure for it.
• Empowering your human change agents: put your AI readiness into high gear and make the shift stick.

What would help you most? Drop a comment with the topic you want first — I will read every one.

Comment below or contact me directly.