# Who Programs Your Agent's Taste? Why Brand Marketing Matters More in an Agentic Future *By James Hills, flowmediamarketing.com — Updated February 2026* There's a compelling argument making the rounds in marketing circles right now, and it goes like this: AI agents will soon make most purchase decisions for consumers. Those agents will optimize on price, specs, and reviews. Therefore, brand loyalty is dead. Cut your content budget, fire your influencer team, and invest in structured product data instead. I understand the appeal. McKinsey projects up to $1 trillion in US B2C agentic commerce by 2030. ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout in September 2025, then added Shopping Research in November - a dedicated comparison engine powered by GPT-5 mini that builds personalized buyer's guides from across the web. By February 2026, OpenAI unified the whole stack into ChatGPT Agent, a single agentic system that doesn't just recommend products but researches, compares, and executes purchases autonomously. Google's AI Mode is building hotel and flight booking with Marriott, IHG, Expedia, and Booking.com. Gartner predicted a 25% drop in traditional search engine volume by the end of 2026. The trajectory is real. But the conclusion - that agents kill brands - isn't just wrong. It's backwards. Brand marketing becomes *more* important in an agentic future, not less. The people cutting their content budgets because "agents don't read blogs" are sawing off the branch they're sitting on. Here's why. ### Key Points To Consider This article argues that brand marketing investments are the inputs AI agents depend on to make recommendations - not relics of a pre-agent world. - AI agents don't generate preferences from nothing - they read the output of years of brand marketing, from content to loyalty data to influencer recommendations. - The "agents kill brands" argument only holds for true commodities; most purchases carry preferences, values, and personal history that agents must account for. - Content marketing IS brand discovery in the agent era - cruise lines, hotels, and brands without publisher coverage become invisible to agents recommending options. - Loyalty program data functions as agent decision infrastructure, giving brands with strong programs a structural advantage in agent-mediated commerce. - McKinsey found that brand-owned pages make up only 5-10% of AI search sources, while publishers, affiliates, and UGC dominate - making the content ecosystem more influential than ever. ### Article Index [Who Shaped the Data Your Agent Is Reading?](https://flowmediamarketing.com/thoughts/who-programs-your-agents-taste-why-brand-marketing-matters-more-in-an-agentic-future.html#who-shaped-the-data-your-agent-is-reading)[The Brand Discovery Problem Nobody Is Talking About](https://flowmediamarketing.com/thoughts/who-programs-your-agents-taste-why-brand-marketing-matters-more-in-an-agentic-future.html#the-brand-discovery-problem-nobody-is-talking-about)[Loyalty Data as Agent Infrastructure](https://flowmediamarketing.com/thoughts/who-programs-your-agents-taste-why-brand-marketing-matters-more-in-an-agentic-future.html#loyalty-data-as-agent-infrastructure)[Shopping Patterns Tell Agents Who You Are](https://flowmediamarketing.com/thoughts/who-programs-your-agents-taste-why-brand-marketing-matters-more-in-an-agentic-future.html#shopping-patterns-tell-agents-who-you-are)[What Actually Happens When Agents Meet Brand Marketing Designed For Humans](https://flowmediamarketing.com/thoughts/who-programs-your-agents-taste-why-brand-marketing-matters-more-in-an-agentic-future.html#what-actually-happens-when-agents-meet-brand-marketing-designed-for-humans)[Don't Cut Your Budgets: Branding Is Even More Important With Agentic Commerce!](https://flowmediamarketing.com/thoughts/who-programs-your-agents-taste-why-brand-marketing-matters-more-in-an-agentic-future.html#dont-cut-your-budgets-branding-is-even-more-important-with-agentic-commerce) The argument that agents will simply find the cheapest option that meets a set of specs is correct - for a narrow slice of commerce. Pure commodities where the consumer has no real preference work that way. Generic batteries. Store-brand paper towels. Maybe even Kroger beans versus Bush's beans. For those transactions, an agent optimizing on price and availability makes perfect sense. But most purchases are not commodities. Running shoes for someone with plantar fasciitis. Wine for an anniversary dinner. A cruise for a family reunion. A jacket for someone who cares about sustainability. A hotel for someone sitting on 40,000 Marriott Bonvoy points. These carry preferences, values, brand relationships, and personal history that the agent *must* understand to serve the consumer well. An agent that ignores all of that and optimizes purely on price will get overridden by annoyed consumers - and quickly lose their trust. As Harvard Business Review noted in February 2026, brands need to structure their content for machines, define clear boundaries, and protect customer data - because the agent ecosystem is here, and how your brand shows up in it matters enormously. The question isn't whether agents will influence purchasing. It's who shaped the preferences those agents are acting on. ## Who Shaped the Data Your Agent Is Reading? If the agent makes the decision, someone programmed the taste. Not in the literal sense - nobody sat down and coded "prefer Patagonia." But every preference data point an agent uses to make a recommendation was *created* by a brand marketing activity somewhere upstream. Think about how an agent learns what a consumer wants. It reads purchase history, content engagement patterns, stated preferences, loyalty program data, and shopping behavior. Now trace each of those back to its origin. She always buys Patagonia. Why? Because an influencer she trusts recommended it three years ago, and the first purchase confirmed the quality matched the promise. He reads cruise reviews on specific travel sites. Why? Because a publisher went on a fam trip, wrote authentically about the experience, and that content ranked for the queries he was searching. She has 40,000 Marriott points. Why? Because Marriott's brand promise of consistency and reliability matched her travel style, and she enrolled in the loyalty program years ago. This family buys in bulk at Costco. Why? Because Costco's brand - value, quality, trust - earned their repeat business over a decade of membership. Every single data point the agent uses was created by a brand marketing activity. Influencer marketing. [content marketing](https://flowmediamarketing.com/marketing-services.html). Product sampling. Experiential marketing. Loyalty programs. These aren't made irrelevant by agents. They're the inputs agents depend on. The CMO who cuts content marketing because "agents don't read blogs" is cutting the pipeline that creates the preference data their agent-mediated sales depend on. They just can't see the connection because the attribution chain is longer than a UTM parameter. ## The Brand Discovery Problem Nobody Is Talking About --- {"html":""} --- Everyone is focused on how agents handle existing preferences. That's the easy scenario - the consumer already knows what they want, and the agent helps them get it faster. But what happens when there are no preferences to act on? A consumer who has never cruised asks their agent to "plan me a cruise vacation." The agent has zero preference data for cruise lines. Where does its recommendation come from? The content ecosystem. Travel publisher reviews. Expert comparison articles. Editorial roundups. Authentic first-person accounts from writers who actually sailed those itineraries. In my experience running travel content sites, this is exactly how discovery works in the agent era. When someone asks an AI assistant about the best [Alaska cruise](https://cruisewestcoast.com/alaska-cruises.html) for foodies, the answer doesn't come from the cruise line's own marketing copy. It comes from the independent publisher who went on that sailing, ate at every venue, and wrote about it with the kind of specificity and personality that AI models recognize as authoritative. Heather Hills, owner of Flow Voyages, sees this playing out with her clients every day. "When a new-to-cruise client comes to me, the first thing I ask is what they've read or heard that made them interested. It's always a specific article, a friend's recommendation, or a creator's video from an actual sailing. That's the content an agent would pull from too - and if a cruise line hasn't invested in getting real people to tell real stories about their product, they simply won't show up in that conversation." McKinsey's research confirms this at scale. They found that brand-owned pages make up only 5-10% of the sources AI-powered search references. Publishers, affiliates, and user-generated content dominate. In categories like consumer packaged goods and financial services, more than 65% of AI search sources come from third-party content. The content ecosystem isn't a nice-to-have. It's the primary recommendation engine. The cruise line that invested in content marketing - fam trips for publishers, influencer partnerships, sampling programs that generate authentic reviews - has content in the ecosystem for the agent to find and cite. The one that only ran Google Ads and paid social does not. No content presence means invisible to agents, which means invisible to consumers using agents for discovery. Here's what I find encouraging about this shift: it's actually more meritocratic than traditional advertising. The brand with the most helpful, most authoritative, most frequently cited content wins the recommendation - not the one with the biggest ad budget. That's good news for smaller brands with authentic stories and genuine expertise. It's threatening for lazy big brands coasting on media spend. ## Loyalty Data as Agent Infrastructure Loyalty programs have always served a straightforward purpose: reward repeat behavior, encourage future purchases, build emotional connection. In an agentic future, they serve a second purpose that's arguably more valuable: they pre-load preference data into the consumer's profile. When an agent evaluates hotel options for a traveler, "she has 40,000 Marriott Bonvoy points" isn't just a perk for the consumer - it's a decision-weight the agent factors into its recommendation. The agent considers points balance, elite status benefits, earning rate, and redemption value. PwC's Holiday Outlook found that 68% of consumers expect to use AI for comparing flights, and 57% for booking travel. Those AI tools will pull loyalty data as a primary input. Brands with strong loyalty programs have a structural advantage because they've built the data infrastructure agents use to recommend them. A double-points promotion isn't just driving this quarter's repeat purchases - it's strengthening the signal that tells agents, "this consumer prefers us." That signal compounds over time, making it progressively harder for competitors to displace the preferred brand in agent-mediated decisions. ## Shopping Patterns Tell Agents Who You Are Beyond explicit preferences and loyalty data, agents learn something subtler: meta-preferences. Does this consumer optimize for short-term savings or long-term value? Buy in bulk or pay a premium for convenience? Chase sales or pay full price for immediacy? Stick with known brands or experiment with new ones? These behavioral patterns create a consumer profile that shapes every recommendation the agent makes. A brand that understands its customer's shopping pattern and markets to it - through pricing strategy, promotional cadence, content tone - will be favored by agents that match on that pattern. This is where brand positioning does its deepest work. A luxury cruise line and a budget cruise line aren't just competing on price. They're competing to match different consumer profiles - and the agent needs the brand's marketing to understand which profile each line serves. The cruise line that clearly communicates its positioning through content, through the experiences it creates, through the stories its past guests tell, gives the agent the information it needs to make the right match. ## What Actually Happens When Agents Meet Brand Marketing Designed For Humans The "agents kill brands" narrative assumes agents operate in a vacuum - optimizing exclusively on specs and price without context provided by humans. In practice, every brand marketing activity creates data that agents consume. As we culturally become more comfortable allowing our agents access to our intimate data, agentic commerce will become even more powerful. For those who think people won't allow "agents" to access their personal data to draw inference from - you need to read a case study on OpenClaw! Here's how agentic commerce actually works when it encounters branding activities designed for humans. | Activity | "Agents kill brands" take | What actually happens | | --- | --- | --- | | Influencer marketing | "Agents don't watch Instagram" | Creates preference data and content agents cite when building recommendations | | Product sampling | "Waste of money if the agent decides" | Creates positive purchase history data that shapes future agent behavior | | Content marketing | "Agents don't read blogs" | Content IS the recommendation source agents use - and brand-owned pages are only 5-10% of it | | Fam trips and experiential | "Low measurable ROI" | Creates authentic, first-person content that AI models trust and cite most | | Loyalty programs | "Agent will just find the cheapest option" | Loyalty data becomes a primary agent decision input, creating structural advantage | | Brand storytelling | "The agent doesn't care about your story" | Brand values create consumer affinity data that agents use to match preferences | The platforms themselves recognize this. ChatGPT began testing ads in February 2026 at roughly $60 CPM - three times what Meta charges. If agents were purely optimizing on specs, there'd be no advertising market inside the agent at all. Perplexity committed $42.5 million to publisher payments with an 80% revenue share through its Comet Plus program. These platforms are paying for the content ecosystem because it's what makes their recommendations valuable. ## Don't Cut Your Budgets: Branding Is Even More Important With Agentic Commerce! Before you cut your content marketing budget because "agents are taking over," ask yourself one question: where will the agent get the preference data it needs to recommend your brand? If your answer involves influencer partnerships, publisher relationships, loyalty program depth, and authentic content from people who've actually experienced what you offer - you're building the infrastructure agents depend on. Every fam trip, every publisher relationship, every piece of content that earns a genuine recommendation creates a data point that agents will read, cite, and act on for years. If your answer is "I don't know" - your brand is about to become invisible to the fastest-growing commerce channel in history. The agent era doesn't make brand marketing obsolete. It makes brand marketing the foundation everything else is built on. **About the Author:** James Hills is the founder of FlowMediaMarketing.com, ManTripping.com and CruiseWestCoast.com, with 20+ years of experience in digital content marketing and brand strategy across travel, lifestyle, and retail. He currently is building AI-assisted agent-optimized content infrastructure for his publishing network. For media inquiries on AI commerce, brand marketing strategy, or the intersection of content and agent-mediated discovery, contact James at FlowMediaMarketing.com or Heather Hills, owner of Flow Voyages, for cruise-industry-specific commentary. 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