How to Market to a Machine: What to Do When the Buyer Sends an AI Agent
Bob Calabritto
A field manual for marketers whose first reader is now an AI agent: what it extracts, what it discards, and what to change on your site this quarter.
What the book covers
- 1
The Reader Is a Machine
Automated traffic passed human traffic in mid-2026. What that changed about who reads your site first, and why most marketing dashboards did not register it.
- 2
How an Agent Actually Shops
What an agent fetches, in what order, what it keeps and what it discards, with a walkthrough you can run yourself for the price of a few API calls.
- 3
The Traffic You Lost Was Worthless
The arithmetic on traffic lost to AI summaries, worked through one company in about ten minutes, and why the loss hurts reported metrics more than it hurts revenue.
- 4
What a Machine Extracts vs. What a Human Extracts
The same homepage read twice: once by a person who comes away with a mood, once by software that comes away with a list of claims.
- 5
Writing for the Buyer’s Lawyer
Writing for a careful reader whose job is to check what you said against somebody with no stake in the answer, before their client signs anything.
- 6
The Cross-Reference Problem
The reviews, forum threads, and directory listings that speak for you, who wrote them, which ones you can still maintain, and what happens to companies that try to cheat.
- 7
ACP, UCP, AP2, x402: What Actually Matters
The agent commerce protocols. What shipped, what was withdrawn, what the numbers said, and which parts a marketer has to decide about now.
- 8
Who Owns the Shelf Now
Amazon against Perplexity, and the question underneath it: whether a store can bar somebody else’s shopping agent at the door.
- 9
Budgeting for a Reader With No Wallet
What advertising inside AI answers costs, how fast those prices moved, and why the answer itself still has no rate card.
- 10
What Happens to the CMO Job
The counts on marketing leadership: how many large companies have one, what the title says, how long the job lasts, and what the budget has done since 2022.
- 11
The Team That Runs Partly on Agents
How the work divides when agents take part of it, from the author’s own operation, because the published research on this does not yet clear the book’s sourcing bar.
- 12
A 90-Day Plan
The previous eleven chapters sequenced onto a calendar, for the reader who skims the plan chapter on a plane.
- 13
Twenty Things to Check on Your Own Site This Week
The twenty checks, each with a pass condition, written to be run without the book attached. Free to read on this site.
Read the twenty checks - 14
What Will Be Wrong About This Book in One Year
Predictions ranked by how likely they are to fail, each with what the failure would cost you and which chapter to reread if it happens.
Who it is for
Written for the person running marketing at a SaaS company who is watching the old playbook decay and being asked about AI strategy by a board that read something alarming on a plane. Also for the ecommerce operator, whose world this hits hardest and fastest, the founder doing their own marketing, and the SEO professional retooling in real time. The examples lean B2B software, because that is where the need is sharpest right now, but the mechanics travel.
Checkable facts
- Title
- How to Market to a Machine
- Subtitle
- What to Do When the Buyer Sends an AI Agent
- Author
- Bob Calabritto
- Publisher
- IdentiBlock Press
- Published
- 2026-11-10
- ISBN, paperback
- 979-8-9979891-0-1
- ISBN, hardcover
- 979-8-9979891-1-8
- ISBN, ebook
- 979-8-9979891-2-5
- Price, paperback
- USD 19.99
- Price, hardcover
- USD 34.99
- Price, ebook
- USD 9.99
- Buy, ebook
- Kindle ebook on Amazon
- Last updated
- 2026-10-02