Traditional search is losing ground to AI at the start of the customer journey. Whether it’s ChatGPT offering instant answers or AI agents making buying decisions on a user’s behalf, the subscription funnel is being radically compressed. Discovery, evaluation, and action are all happening inside the AI.
In Part 1 of this deep dive, we looked at the scale of that shift. From zero-click behaviour to the rise of agentic commerce.
In this, part 2 of the deep dive, we focus on what subscription brands can do about it: how to structure content, manage AI access, and measure visibility in a world where traffic is no longer the metric that matters.
Creating content for AI
So how do you actually build content that earns a place inside AI-generated responses — and, increasingly, AI agents’ decision sets?
It starts with structure. Not in the “meta tags and headlines” sense, but in how your content aligns with how AI models interpret meaning, evaluate authority, and choose which answers to surface.
This is where subscription brands can think about how they present content value in an AI age — for humans and machines.
Rethinking AI access
For many media organisations and other content creators, the rise of AI crawlers has triggered some defensive instincts. This article in The Atlantic, explains how publishers are responding to AI’s content-scraping surge in three key ways, by:
- Blocking them (as best they can) from crawling their work
- Pursuing legal action
- Signing licensing deals
The reaction is understandable. AI Overviews are reshaping user behaviour and slashing referral traffic, while bots scrape copyrighted content without compensation. There are two issues here:
- AI Overviews are entering the consumer mainstream. It will be impossible to walk it back.
- For content that drives commerce and conversion, the equation is different from above. Here, AI agents can boost value.
AI expert Paul Hood, head of publishing at the House of Commons, says that, generally, content providers need to be smarter about how they consider AI access. “With bots already making up 50% of all internet traffic, blocking them simply because they’re AI is a blunt — and outdated — strategy. You need to understand what they’re doing, who they’re for, and craft granular rules accordingly.”
“Legacy defences — like blocking IP ranges or denying access via user agents — may have worked in the past. But now, they risk sweeping up good bots with the bad, and in doing so, cutting off your brand from visibility in the very tools users rely on to find answers.”
He believes treating every bot as a villain misses the opportunity. “Some AI agents are acting on behalf of real users. Sometimes blocking them means blocking your next sale.”
Nor is blocking them failsafe. “Robots.txt was never a firewall — just a polite suggestion. Today, many bots ignore it entirely,” he says. “Some even scan it to identify valuable content worth crawling. Robots.txt has always been a voluntary handshake, not a firewall.”
Hood believes site owners must have more visibility and control. “The future is about identifying, authenticating, and then granting access to the right bots for the right reasons, not just brute-force exclusion.”
AI visibility starts with access. This isn’t just a tech issue anymore. It’s a distribution strategy choice.
Reframing AI content readiness
“To drive subscriptions in an AI-first world, create content that’s not just found, but indispensable to the answers your customers seek,” says Hood.
For AI models, indispensable content means clear structure, semantic depth, and original insight. The best-performing pieces tend to answer common questions, offer expert context, and use formatting — like lists or step-by-step guides — that’s easy to parse and reuse.
Featured snippets — those short summaries at the top of Google results — are a useful signal of content that AI considers authoritative. SE Ranking data shows that 66% of snippet links match those used in Google’s AI Overviews.
But snippets are only part of the picture. Structured formats like FAQs, how-tos, and definitions don’t just help with legacy SEO. They improve your chances of being selected, cited, or transacted on by AI agents. Think of snippet optimisation not as the end goal, but as a proxy for how AI-ready your content really is.
This logic extends beyond text. AI tools pull insights from rich media too — transcribing, summarising, and indexing audio and video alongside web copy. Explainers, demos, interviews, and podcasts, when properly transcribed and marked up, can surface in tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Here’s how four common content formats help turn AI visibility into strategic subscription outcomes:
| Content Format | Why It Matters | Strategic Impact |
| Product or Service Pages | Makes pricing, features, and plan details machine-readable. | Ensures your offers are included in assistant-style comparisons — not buried. |
| FAQ Sections | Frames answers to common questions in a format AI can easily lift. | Boosts your authority in AI Overviews and improves discovery for undecided users. |
| Customer Review Sections | Labels testimonials and star ratings for trust-building visibility. | Adds credibility and drives engagement with social proof that AIs can surface. |
| How-To Guides and Explainers | Breaks processes into steps AI can parse. | Positions your brand as helpful and expert — influencing purchase decisions indirectly. |
However, AI visibility doesn’t just depend on thoughtful content. It also depends on how that content is structured.
Structure is strategy:
- That means making sure content teams (or their partners) are fluent in tools like schema markup. Once seen as a technical SEO trick, schema is now critical for helping AI understand your content.
- The same goes for entity linking, which connects your content to trusted sources and builds machine-readable authority.
When these layers work together, they form your content’s knowledge graph — a foundation for consistent AI visibility.
This is no longer an SEO side hustle. It’s core infrastructure for subscription growth in an AI-led ecosystem.
Rethinking measurement
When answers happen off-site, site traffic stops telling the full story. Some strategic shifts to consider:
- Track your presence in featured snippets and AI-generated Overviews for key subscription-related queries.
- Monitor brand mentions and citations across AI platforms, even when there’s no click.
- Identify which formats (e.g. FAQs, expert guides) get surfaced most often by AI tools and look for links between those formats and late-stage subscription actions (e.g. branded search, direct visits, conversion lift).
Because AI often credits multiple sources, your goal is to be one of them. Repeatedly. Why? When your content shows up consistently and with clear attribution, it builds trust, drives interest, and boosts conversion.
The subscription opportunity
The advantage will lie with those brands that treat AI visibility as infrastructure, not just a marketing task. These are the brands that:
- Build machine-readable content that clearly articulates their value
- Use schema markup and semantic structure to connect the dots between offer and expertise
- Monitor performance across AI platforms, not just owned channels
- Align editorial authority with technical precision
Here are three quick, final take-outs:
- Open the right doors: Don’t block all bots by default. Understand who’s crawling content and why. Smart AI access is part of distribution strategies.
- Structure for meaning, not just rankings: Use schema markup, but go deeper. Link related content. Build semantic context. Help AI connect the dots between expertise and offers.
- Redefine performance: Look beyond clickthroughs. Track where your content is surfaced in AI responses, connect new touchpoints to later-stage subscription behaviour.
Cobus Heyl is a content partner at Atlas and founder of That Coalition, a fractional event services and content provider.
Heyl has worked with third-party clients such as Chartbeat, Flashes & Flames, Prospect and The Times & Sunday Times in the UK, and industry bodies such as PRCA (Communications and Public Affairs), MVFP (German Publishers Association), the Association of Indian Media (AIM) and FIPP – Connecting Global Media.
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