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Handling discovery when fans outsource decision-making
AI search agents will not care much about your brand equity.
From typing to tapping to talking at internet-enabled devices, discovery in the internet era has, to date, involved the user choosing their destination, for the information or content they were looking for.
Agentic AI searches – where your answers are pre-selected and summarized by software – are the first steps to AI services making decisions and taking actions for you.
Author: Daniel Ayers
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Traditional search is not dead yet – it’s possible to organically outrank the AI Overview in Google and there’s evidence that users prefer it – but ‘zero-click’ outcomes (answers which don’t result in a site visit) are rising fast.
That’s due in part to an early-adopter shift to AI search tools. ChatGPT is the gorilla with 80% of this market, but the growth of the sector is enough to keep Perplexity (10% share) and Microsoft’s CoPilot (4%) on a sharp upward tick also. Google’s own Gemini tool will bolster their position over time and the ‘AI Mode’ tab in Google search results is already good at sports questions, usually citing better sources than those which top the traditional website rankings.
Dedicated AI browsers are being launched – OpenAI’s Atlas product combines traditional search features with ChatGPT’s functionality, including an ‘agent mode’ that can trawl your browsing history for contextual answers – and most existing browsers will likely incorporate similar functions.
Apple’s renewed focus on App Intents for Apple Intelligence means voice or text prompts can retrieve info and perform actions within apps on your device; Android have similar with Google’s Gemini AI. Again, the direction of travel is towards the execution of actions being taken away from the user and handled by AI.
The use case beloved of launch keynotes is that agentic AI will ‘book a holiday for you’, handling the heavy lifting of destination research, travel logistics and the purchase itself.
The key question is: do you trust AI to get the decision right, and with your payment details?
Open AI’s Sam Altman is bullish on instant checkout in ChatGPT; it’s a friction-removing feature that should have already been successful for Meta and TikTok but hasn’t caught on outside of ‘everything apps’ like WeChat in China. Trust is a big part of the reason; users may love individual apps, but the data privacy reputation of the parent companies keeps trust lower than in any other sector.
ChatGPT feels different, for now; it’s used as a ‘friend’ by many and always aims to please. It’s a different relationship between user and software, and enough like a trustworthy buddy that there’s a good chance Altman is right.
When you combine these factors – operating systems that open and take actions in your apps for you, and AI search tools that choose your answer and make bookings and purchases for you – the trend towards fans outsourcing their decision-making becomes clear.
Those decisions will include what merch to buy from which store, which events fit their calendar and price-bracket, and even what sport participation fits their lifestyle. How does your store, your event, your tournament get discovered when the process is abstracted by an AI agent?
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Considering GEO not just SEO
Traffic to sports rightsholder websites has suffered from zero click searches for a while now – Google’s ‘OneBox’ dominates answers for game-led questions by showing fixtures, results and standings, complete with post-game highlights and in-game live scores and video clips.
Now AI Overviews are coming for informational searches, and your website simply won’t regain the lost organic search traffic which this displaces. Any commercial value based around rightsholder website impressions is likely to drop accordingly.
The SEO industry, as venerable as it is, has always been about ‘gaming’ the search algorithms; a continual arms race between Google to rank sites based on ‘best answer for the user’ and SEOs trying to convince it that your site holds that answer.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) so far has far fewer tricks in its box, other than writing good content in a structure that answers questions, and conferring some authority by ensuring content has a visible author who a human being with a verifiable profile is.
Take smart technical steps and be the authority on your IP
Sport content is a hugely competitive space. Lots of media are publishing regular match reports, opinion pieces and transfer rumors. But no-one is writing at any volume about sport governance, rules or hospitality. Therefore, it’s quite feasible for federations, leagues and clubs to be the primary cited authority on these topics when they relate to their owned products such as league rules, stadia, or membership benefits, for example.
There are practical hygiene steps that any rightsholder with a website or app should take: schema markup for web, particularly around FAQ and Person content, plus action compatibility within apps for Apple and Android Intents to use.
Most purchase actions in sport are handled by third parties in ticketing or retail, so lobby your provider on how they plan to approach agentic transactions.
Organizationally, monthly checks on what AI search is saying about you and how it answers common questions about your products should become part of governance processes, so you can react to any wrong information by producing your own authoritative content.
We haven't been here before
There is the temptation to dismiss the concept of agentic AI taking actions for us as overhyped; we’ve been here with new tech before of course, most recently with smart speakers (which have a place in our lives, but that place is playing music and turning lights on and off, and generating significant losses for their manufacturers). And for sure, users won’t immediately start entrusting very sensitive or complex tasks to the AI.
The reason to believe is an intangible – AI assistants feel like a human helping you, not a robot. Technically they’re more like us using the internet, filling out forms and opening new tabs for reference – and emotionally they’re on our side.
It is realistic that AI agent results for the user are legitimately better than if they were doing their own research. But once AI starts making their decisions, the moat that your brand equity has afforded you in mainstream media and in traditional search results, starts to recede.
