I've spent the last year watching business owners pour effort into SEO, and somewhere along the way a second internet started being built underneath the first one. A company called Keenable just came out of stealth with $26 million in seed funding, and what they're building isn't a search engine for you and me. It's a search index for AI agents. That's a different thing, and the difference matters more than it sounds.

Here's the shift I keep coming back to. Human search and machine search optimize for fundamentally different things. The pages that rank well on Google were written and structured to satisfy a human reader scanning results in a fraction of a second — a headline, a snippet, a click. An AI agent doesn't scan. It ingests. It extracts facts, resolves entities, checks consistency across sources, and assembles an answer it can stand behind. The infrastructure that served the first job well is, as Keenable puts it, wasted on the second. Retrofitting one into the other throws away most of the advantage.

What's striking is the positioning. Keenable isn't building a chatbot, an agent framework, or a model. It's selling the layer underneath all of them — the index those agents query when they need to know something about the world. And right now, AI agents access that web knowledge sparingly, because the existing infrastructure makes every lookup expensive and uncertain. Keenable's bet is that agents should never think twice about querying the web. If they're right, the volume and shape of web access changes. More queries, more extractions, more places where your business either gets found clearly or doesn't get found at all.

I've been watching this pattern take shape and the honest truth is I don't think anyone knows exactly how it settles. This is new. It's changing almost daily. The people who insist they've found the one certain way to win are probably ahead of the evidence. But here's what I do know: the businesses that get found by AI agents are the ones whose facts are clean, consistent, and structured in a way a machine can read. That part isn't speculative. It's the baseline requirement of being in the index at all.

What to do about it

First, audit your content for agent readability. I don't mean add more keywords. I mean look at your pages the way a machine reads them: is the information structured and semantic, or is it buried in prose a human can parse but an agent has to guess at? Your business name, your services, your service area, your hours — these should be stated plainly and in the same shape everywhere. If an agent has to interpret, you've given it work to do, and agents don't reward extra work.

Second, make your facts consistent across every touchpoint. Your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing, your website footer, your industry directories — the address, phone number, hours, and service descriptions should match character for character. I keep seeing engines treat minor mismatches as a trust signal against the business. The agent is checking whether your story holds together. Make it hold together.

Third, invest in structured data. Schema markup that explicitly defines your business as an entity — what it is, what it offers, where it is, how it relates to other things — is the language agents read natively. This isn't about gaming anything. It's about removing ambiguity. If you're a plumber in Austin specializing in tankless water heater installation, schema lets you say that in a form the agent doesn't have to infer.

Fourth, start watching how AI agents cite your business. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini about your industry and your area. See whether you appear, how you're described, and what sources they're pulling from. That tells you where you're visible and where the gaps are. You can't fix what you haven't measured, and in a field moving this fast, the only real strategy is to keep measuring and adjusting. That's the whole game right now.