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Originally published on LinkedIn · July 20, 2026 · Jeff Mays
Every agency owner I talk to has the same quiet worry right now:
"Is AI going to make what we sell irrelevant?"
Here's the honest answer: Your clients still need a website. That part isn't going away.
But the website is no longer where the buyer's decision gets made.
And if your agency isn't managing what happens before someone reaches the site, you're leaving your best clients exposed.
The decision moved upstream.
A few years ago, the path was simple:
Search → Click → Website → Decide
Today, a growing share of buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews a question — "who's the best [service] near me?" — and form an opinion inside that answer, before a single website loads.
Your client's beautiful site is still there. It's just no longer the first impression.
The AI's answer is.
That's not a reason to stop building websites. It's a reason to start managing a second layer that sits above the website: your client's AI presence .
The trap: treating this as "citation tracking."
Here's where a lot of agencies are about to make a mistake.
As tools appear that tell you "you were mentioned 14 times this week," it's tempting to treat AI presence as a monitoring problem — a dashboard that counts citations.
Citation tracking is the shallow version of the problem.
Knowing you were mentioned tells you almost nothing about whether you're winning.
The question that actually moves revenue isn't "Am I cited?"
It's:
When a buyer asks AI about your client's category, does AI recommend them, ignore them, or actively send the buyer to a competitor?
Those are three completely different business outcomes, and a citation counter can't tell them apart.
A business can be "mentioned" constantly and still lose every deal because the AI recommends someone else in the same breath.
That's the gap between a monitoring dashboard and a managed presence layer — and it's the gap your agency can own.
What most agencies will get wrong (and why that's your advantage).
The agencies that move first on this are going to treat it like SEO 2.0.
They'll apply the same playbook: keyword research, backlinks, content volume, technical tweaks. They'll optimize for crawlability and hope that translates to recommendations.
It won't.
Here's why: AI tools don't rank websites. They synthesize answers.
Google's algorithm ranks pages based on authority signals and relevance. AI models extract facts, weigh credibility, and construct a response. The mechanics are fundamentally different.
That means the optimization strategy is different too.
An AI model doesn't care that you have 47 backlinks from local directories. It cares whether the information about your client's business is clear, consistent, structured, and appears in contexts that signal trustworthiness.
It's not about gaming an algorithm. It's about making your client's business legible to a machine that's trying to answer a question accurately.
Most agencies will miss that distinction. They'll keep doing what worked in 2019 and wonder why their clients aren't showing up in AI answers.
That gap — between what agencies think works and what actually influences AI recommendations — is where the opportunity sits.
What actually works: the technical layer most agencies aren't touching.
If you want to influence how AI tools represent your client's business, you need to manage three things most agencies currently ignore:
1. Structured, machine-readable business information.
AI models pull facts from sources they can parse cleanly. That means schema markup, consistent NAP data, and content written in a way that makes key facts easy to extract.
If your client's "About" page is a vague brand story with no clear service list, no location data, and no structured formatting, the AI has nothing concrete to work with. It'll either skip them or pull outdated information from a third-party directory.
You need to make the facts obvious. What services do they offer? Where do they operate? What problems do they solve? What makes them credibly different?
This isn't creative copywriting. It's information architecture for machine consumption.
2. Credibility signals that aren't just backlinks.
AI models weight sources differently than Google does. A mention in a local news article, a case study on a partner's site, or a detailed review on a trusted platform carries more influence than 50 directory listings.
The question isn't "how many places mention us?" It's "do the places that mention us make the business look like a credible answer to this question?"
That shifts the strategy from volume to context. One good citation in the right place beats a hundred weak ones.
3. Consistency across the entire digital footprint.
If your Google Business Profile says one thing, your website says another, and your LinkedIn company page has a third version, the AI doesn't know which one is true — so it hedges, generalizes, or skips you entirely.
Consistency isn't just good practice. It's a ranking signal for AI recommendation. The more aligned your information is across sources, the more confidently the AI can present it.
This is the part agencies already do for local SEO. The difference is that now it matters for a second reason — and it's worth a second service line.
Why this is an opportunity, not a threat.
Think about what this changes for your business model.
Websites are largely a one-time build with occasional retainer work.
AI presence is different: it shifts, it needs monitoring, it responds to what you actually do off-site, and it varies by platform.
That's the definition of a recurring service — and it attaches to clients you already have.
You don't need a new market. You need a new layer for your existing one.
The web design client. The SEO client. The local business you already serve.
Every one of them now has an AI presence that's either helping them or quietly costing them customers.
Nobody is managing it.
You're already the person they trust with how they show up online.
That's the recurring revenue line most agencies are walking right past.
The window is shorter than you think.
Here's the part that should make you move faster: AI presence optimization has a first-mover advantage that traditional SEO never had.
With Google, if you started SEO late, you could still catch up. It just took longer. The playing field was always open.
With AI recommendation, the dynamics are different.
AI models are trained on existing data. If your competitor gets recommended consistently for the next six months and you don't, that pattern gets baked into how the model "thinks" about your category in your market.
You're not just fighting for visibility. You're fighting to be part of the model's mental map of who the credible players are.
And once that map is set, it's harder to rewrite.
That means the agencies and businesses that establish a strong AI presence now — while most of their competitors are still ignoring this — will have a structural advantage that compounds over time.
Six months from now, when your client's competitor is already the default recommendation and you're trying to catch up, the work gets harder and the results get slower.
The time to move is while the question still sounds early.
It's not.
What "managing AI presence" actually looks like in practice.
This isn't a one-time project. It's a service layer that runs parallel to everything you already do.
Here's what it looks like when an agency actually delivers this:
Month 1: Run the initial audit. Show the client what AI says about them right now. Identify the gaps — missing services, wrong location data, weak credibility signals, inconsistent information.
Month 2: Fix the foundation. Update schema, align business information across directories, rewrite key pages to be machine-readable, add structured FAQs.
Month 3: Build credibility signals. Publish a case study, get featured in a local outlet, optimize the Google Business Profile for AI extraction, coordinate reviews that mention specific services.
Ongoing: Monthly monitoring and optimization. Track how AI answers are changing. Adjust content and structure based on what's working. Manage new credibility opportunities. Report progress.
It's not a website redesign. It's not an SEO overhaul. It's a manageable, recurring engagement that produces measurable results — and it's something clients can't do themselves.
That's the service.
Where to start (this is the part you can do this week).
Don't overthink it.
Pick one client and run a single audit. Not to sell them anything yet — just to see the truth for yourself:
Does AI recommend them, ignore them, or send buyers elsewhere?
That one result will tell you more about the opportunity than any think-piece (including this one).
In my experience, the answer is rarely what the client assumes — and that surprise is exactly what turns "nice to know" into a paid engagement.
You can run that first audit in about 90 seconds at rediforai.com/start . See where one of your clients actually stands in AI search, then decide what it's worth to manage it.
Your clients still need a website.
They also need someone managing the layer above it.
That someone should be you.
— Jeff