The Growing Audience B2B Brand Teams Aren't Writing For

Last week, Cloudflare and GoDaddy announced a partnership giving website owners visibility and control over which AI agents crawl their sites, and the ability to block or charge for that access. Filing this under infrastructure news and moving on would be a mistake for any brand leader.

The internet now has two kinds of visitors: humans and machines acting on their behalf. Automated traffic grew eight times faster than human traffic in 2025, and Cloudflare's CEO predicts bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027. The shift is already well underway.

I've spent years helping companies think about how their brand lands with the people who matter, and that framework needs updating. The people still matter, but they're no longer the only audience reading what a brand publishes.

The brand AI agents actually see

When an AI agent visits a website, it doesn't experience the brand the way a human does. The design quality and hundreds of subtle signals that humans absorb don’t matter. What it reads is text, and specifically, structured text: page titles, headings, product descriptions, about pages, and blog posts.

Cloudflare has already been converting web pages to markdown for AI agents. That’s plain text with a basic structure, no design, and no brand personality communicated through visual choices. Words and hierarchy are the entire brand experience for a machine.

The foundational brand work that often gets treated as a strategy document exercise, the positioning, the messaging architecture, the core differentiation, is now the primary input into how AI systems describe a company to potential buyers. Website redesign and campaign creative no longer lead the way. Words that are precise, consistent, and structured enough for a machine to extract and summarize accurately do.

I haven't seen many B2B brand teams audit their digital presence from this angle. 

• The consistency problem: If a homepage says one thing, LinkedIn another, and a two-year-old blog post something contradictory, an AI agent synthesizes all of it into whatever output its model produces. The only fix is upstream and requires a centralized messaging framework that every piece of content maps back to.

• The gating problem: Gated content, JavaScript-heavy pages, and PDFs locked behind forms are effectively invisible to AI agents. LLM bots now crawl 3.6 times more than Googlebot, and they're not filling out forms. If the clearest articulation of what a company does and why it matters lives behind a gate, AI agents won't find it. The positioning that matters most needs to live in plain, accessible, crawlable text. For most B2B companies, this comes from a significant content audit, not a minor tweak.

What brand leaders should actually do

Which companies AI tools recommend to buyers is a brand question that most teams haven't claimed ownership of.

I've watched companies invest heavily in SEO and content operations while their core positioning remained unresolved. No amount of structured data or crawl optimization fixes that. AI agents will find the messaging confusion and represent it, making that problem even more expensive.

• Positioning, then design: The right starting point is the positioning that the content is supposed to reflect. What does the company do, for whom, and why does it matter more than the alternatives? This should be one sentence. If that sentence lives in a strategy document nobody references, start there. Once it exists, it needs to live in plain, crawlable language on the homepage, the about page, and every major product page. Make it stated, not implied.

• Old content is a liability: Old content doesn't disappear from an AI agent's view just because it's outdated. For example, a case study describing the company as something it no longer is can get pulled into the synthesis alongside the current homepage. A messaging consistency audit is overdue for most B2B companies.

• Make the crawl policy decision deliberately: The Cloudflare-GoDaddy partnership gives brands control over which AI agents access their content. Some crawlers surface brands in live answers and send referral traffic back, while others extract content for model training and return nothing. A business's content could feed a competitor's AI without any brand benefit. These are positioning decisions, and brand leaders should be making them.

The brands that get this right early will define how their category gets described by AI systems for years. The ones that don't will keep wondering why they're not showing up in conversations they can't see, by which point the gap will be very hard to close.