As Seen by AI: Webinar Recording and Transcript

The following is an edited transcript from the webinar “As Seen by AI,” presented by Marina Petrova, CEO and Co-Founder of Intentful. The transcript has been lightly revised for clarity and length, and a video recording of the session is included below. The explanations and observations in this transcript reflect Intentful’s best understanding of current AI system behavior as of October 2025. While no one truly knows the exact internal mechanisms of the AI systems, the summary is based on observed behavior and hands-on testing.

Marina Petrova: Thank you, everyone, for joining today. It's going to be an interesting, or at least I hope so, session, and we'll talk about how AI systems see the websites, or I should probably say, how AI systems see your brands.

Today, we will talk about three core things. One is what matters now, in October 2025. Then I'll show you how AI actually sees some of the websites. We had several volunteers for this webinar who suggested that we review their website, so I will share that. And then we will also do an agentic search demo, and I will show how this can be done for your company or destination, so that you can do this yourself or with your teams to see how AI interprets your website. And then, based on all of the information, about what matters right now, I will provide recommendations on discoverability that I believe are important, and that our team believes are important.

Fundamentally, AI is changing not just search, but how our customers, our visitors, our users engage with information and with content in a completely different way.

For those of you who don't know us, Intentful started in 2021, and since founding, we've been building AI that knows brands, knows destinations, knows companies. We work with organizations around the world, and with companies in tourism and travel, performing arts, CPG/FMCG, telecommunications, agencies, and we continue expanding globally.

Everything that I will be talking about today is built on Intentful’s real expertise and our experience of building with AI every single day. All of our products are powered by AI search, so everything, every single recommendation that you will get is not something that is based on what, you know, we found online or read in a thought leadership blog. It is the work we do every day, and it is something that keeps evolving every single day. I want to share this knowledge with you, and hope that this will be helpful as you look at how to improve your visibility online.

While we will talk about search a lot today, one thing that I would like you to keep in mind is that the change that is happening is way more profound than just search. It's about working with information in general. And I'm not going to talk about the obvious things. You all already know how search is changing, how traffic dropped. This is something that everyone knows already.

One thing to keep in mind is that the way AI generates a response is that, unlike the old world, where optimization was mostly built around a core company/brand website, right now, in a single response, in one query, AI looks at hundreds, and sometimes actually even more, information sources. So, while the goal is to make sure that your web presence is optimized, it's no longer just about the website. It's really about multiple, multiple touchpoints where your brand can be mentioned, and you'll see that as we get to the demo.

I believe it was one of Google founders who mentioned that it is not hundreds of information sources, but it is thousands {in a single query analysis}. I don't know if he meant that just, like, you know, to illustrate the volume, but I won't be surprised if AI actually looks at thousands of sources before it provides the response.

This leads to another fundamental change that goes just beyond optimizing your website.

Without your input, AI will be defining your brand based on what it finds, and not on what you intend. Think about that in the context of your content programs, PR campaigns, or anywhere that your brand is mentioned. 

To sum it up, you really have two goals right now. I mean, way more, but let's simplify. So, goal one is you need to make sure that you are discoverable by the AI systems, and goal two is owning the story that AI tells about you.

As we were getting ready for this webinar, and I was exchanging emails with the companies and volunteers who said “yes, please include our website into analysis”, but one of the destinations and their agency said that, after we exchanged a little bit further, they said, “don't include us as an example, because the way AI talks about the destination is not exactly how we would like it to be.” There is a lot of work that needs to be done and there is a lot of effort that needs to go into this goal, into owning the story that AI tells about you.

I have been saying this for years, and I will continue saying that content is super, super important, but that's not where you start. And also, this is something that sounds so obvious, but it is not until you see how important that is that it becomes evident that content is actually your goal number two.

And your number one goal is discoverability.

Right now, most, I will not say all, because that's not the case, but most websites are not optimized for AI systems, just because they were built for a different playbook, different time.

So, the way the websites are structured, we are talking about structure, they are not visible. A lot of content is just simply not visible to AI, and you will see this in the demo, and then you will be able to play with it yourself later on.

There are three things. 

One, your website needs to be open to the AI bots, to the AI crawlers. There is this perception that it is best not to open your website to AI bots because of the hosting growing costs, and because they just behave differently than Google did.

This is all true, but you can manage that. You can decide how many times you allow bots to come to the website, but step one, you need to make sure that your website is open to the bots. Otherwise, they will not be able to include you in their knowledge bases.

Those volunteers that send us their websites for analysis, some of them have about a half of the bots that are not allowed on the website. For the companies that are based in the EU, and I will follow up with you guys later, your websites are completely blocked from the AI systems, so they come to the website, and then they are not allowed to get in. That's why, no matter how beautiful the content is on the website, AI will not be able to see it.

And when I say AI, while I mean the bots from OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic. And of course, Google. Traditional SEO still is important for multiple purposes, but also you need to be optimizing for discoverability by the AI systems, and not just traditional search.

As you know, each website now has two audiences. So we have the human audience, that would be our audience one, and audience two is an AI system.

For example purposes, we have volunteers from Destination Marketing Organizations, DMOs, that promote and market a destination to visitors and support local communities.I love DMO websites. I think they are all so beautiful. Like many, I'm a very visual person. It's important for me to see pictures, colors, style, and I just enjoy so much looking at every destination website, because there is so much love and so much connection that goes into building each of these websites.

But again, we now have two audiences. So, I included a couple of screenshots here from some of the websites that suggested that we look at them. And these are all, again, colorful, beautiful. With lots of information, with everything that seems natural, structured, very clear for a human eye.

For one of the examples, we'll go a little bit more into detail, for the destination in Wisconsin, and I'm always concerned that I will pronounce it incorrectly. It’s Oconowomoc. This is a website that is very typical of many destination websites, and it has all of the information about things to do, and places to stay, and where to eat, and all of that. And so, for the humans, it looks beautiful, with a live video embedded, very inspiring.

So, this is how a human sees a website.

This is what the AI system sees as exactly that same home page of the website.

Why is that? So, this is because of how the page is structured, and so this is somewhere, sitting somewhere in the page code, and that is the only thing that AI can see for the home page.

This is a very good example, and thank you so much, Paige, if you're on the call, for letting us use this example, but this is very, very similar to many other DMO and other websites. 

So what a human sees is absolutely not what an AI system would see.

Another example, another page here, is Things to Do that has so much information that is very valuable for this size DMO, it has beaches, fishing, water activities, boat rentals, theater, concerts, sports. I can only imagine how much work went into building this, into structuring this, and into having all of the information easy to use. And this is how the AI system would read the same page.

This is actually quite good compared to many other DMO websites, because many will only have, like, one paragraph or just a couple of lines, and all of this information will not be there. However, this is still only a fraction of what's actually here. When AI bot comes to the website, if it doesn't find the information in seconds or in milliseconds, it moves on to another source of information. So, if it doesn't see what it needs to see, it leaves the website, and that means that you lost the connection with the potential visitor.

The next example here, and I just randomly clicked and chose a section called “Water”, the only thing that AI can see is just the title of the page, and then there is a blank page. There is nothing.

As I mentioned, this is just for one destination, but as we look at multiple websites and multiple destinations, and out of those that volunteered to be included. Except for the header, there is nothing, or there is not much.

So, discoverability is an important first step, because it will help you be visible, so that all of the effort and budget and energy that goes into building out content will actually pay off. Otherwise, it will be visible only to your human audiences. I guess advertising still remains an option to drive traffic, but that is not enough. So, for all things organic, you now need to make sure that your pages don't look empty like these ones.

I also would like to show you a demo of the Agantic Search in ChatGPT, and I'm sure many of you played with it. 

Great. So, this is a pre-recorded video that, I literally did yesterday, just to make sure that it is recent information. The query is made up, as I'm not speaking at the conference as I included in the prompt, but because it was within my ChatGPT Business account, and it already knows me, and I wanted to give it some context. What I'm asking it to do is that I have never been to the destination before, where should I stay, and also I would like to have the recommendation on the best places to eat, and so on.

And then an important thing, unlike the traditional ChatGPT search that you run, activate the agentic mode here. Why is that? Because then you will be able to see its reasoning and its thinking, and it will give you so much insight into how it makes decisions and what it does. So let's play this, and I will be stopping it occasionally just to show you some of the thinking process.

So it is the same destination that we looked at, Oconomowoc in Wisconsin. If you have not tried it before, I really encourage you to try. You can record it or you can watch it as you go. I recommend recording, because then you can stop and read to see exactly how it reasons.

What We Saw in the Agentic Demo

• The model began by deciding to open the official DMO website, identifying it as a credible, local source for lodging information beyond TripAdvisor.
  → Notable because it now distinguishes between official and unofficial sites — something earlier versions didn’t do.
  
  
• It explored the site’s dining section, noticed that the main page only contained restaurant name but no other info, and then followed the restaurant link to find detailed listings.
  
  
• When the page didn’t provide the needed data, it returned to search results and began visiting individual restaurant websites.
  
  
• It evaluated these sites, noting that although the pages were simple, they included valuable sections like “Our Story” and “Local Partners” — and decided to open those for more context.
  
  
• The entire search sequence was much faster than before — about 5 minutes instead of 10–15 — while still gathering and integrating details from multiple sites.
  
  
• The model then turned to Travel Wisconsin, the state tourism website, but detected that the site blocked automated access. → It made a quick decision to stop trying and moved on to other open sites such as Twisted Fire.
  
  
• When opening the Twisted Fire site, it noted that heavy use of images limited readable text — an observation relevant to how AI perceives content accessibility.
  → A reminder: content is critical, but technical accessibility (crawlability, readable structure) is the first step.
  
  
• It then attempted to access MapQuest and other sources, returning intermittently to try again Travel Wisconsin despite the block, showing persistent reasoning in its exploration.
  
  
• The model visited Yelp, but could not extract content due to dynamic loading.
  → It recognized this limitation, exited, and proceeded to a restaurant’s own website (Badger Burger).
  
  
• On that site, it encountered a long page, went to code line 888 and processed it efficiently — demonstrating how it can scan and interpret extensive content almost instantly.
  
  
• It analyzed the text (e.g., “flavorful burger ingredients”) and assessed its usefulness for travelers, then looped back to the DMO site for more context.
  
  
• The process illustrated how agentic AI mirrors human reasoning — exploring, cross-checking, and synthesizing information — but at a scale and speed we humans can’t match.
  
  
• Finally, it produced a coherent summary combining content from the DMO, restaurant, and travel sites.
  
  

Running such a recorded agentic search for your own destination or business lets you observe how AI perceives your online presence — what it can read, what it skips, and how it prioritizes sources.

Marina Petrova: I did not follow up with any questions, because obviously my goal was just to show to you how it searches for information, but of course, for the user, they will likely follow up with more information that is specific to their visit.

I really, really encourage you to see how that is happening, and how it, looks at your company websites and what other sources of information it uses. 

Now, how do we actually make sure that your website is in that list?

There are three core steps. Some of you may have already heard me speak about this. It is still relevant, it still stays the same.

Turn this into a checklist, and have a conversation with your web team or developers. Discuss it point by point, and let them show you specifically that, okay, the website is open to Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google, Apple, AI, and others, or that it is not restricted, or that if it is restricted, then you have, let's say, you are letting them, the bots, in once a day, or three times a day, so that they can actually collect the information.

If you have significant traffic, and if you are concerned that your hosting costs will go up, then take a look at what are the current robot.txt rules and what is allowed. Your development team will show it to you. You don't need to be a developer to actually understand what's there to say, well, this probably makes sense, or this doesn't make sense.

Sitemap deserves special attention. For some reason, sitemaps have been pretty much ignored. I would say in 95% of cases, sitemaps are a mess.

First, you need to make sure that you actually have a sitemap, because, with many websites that we have seen, probably 35% don't even have a sitemap.

Once you actually have access to sitemap, and you can see it online, that's pretty simple, make an effort, spend an hour, and see the pages that are included in the sitemap, because that is not only a sitemap, it's a map for the AI to understand what content is available on the website. What you will see is there is a ton of outdated content, there is a ton of content that is no longer relevant, and while in the old search world it sometimes made sense, because you hoped that someone would actually land on that page, and then they will come to the other page of the website. This is no longer the case. So make sure that the content is fresh and updated.

Also, make sure that all of the pages that you want to be included are actually included. We see this all the time, that someone would publish a page, but it is not available in the sitemap. No one will ever find it unless you actually drive traffic to it with ads. It's of course one way to drive traffic, but why not do that organically? 

You will quickly understand how it works once you actually see the first sitemap. Spend some time, clean it up, make sure that it is up-to-date, and also talk to your web team to make sure you know how it is being updated. Is it manual? Is it automated? What's the current process in place?

Make sure your website is accessible, and accessible, I mean, in this case, accessible from the accessibility standpoint, that it is optimized according to all of the standards, or at least according to the best that you can, because that is also very, very critical in terms of what AI can see.

And you saw the dynamic rendering example in ChatGPT agentic reasoning demo. I'm not saying that you should remove dynamic loading elements, that's not possible, but talk with your team, web developers, to see if there is a way to show dynamic elements as static, because AI needs to understand that content exists, and then an agent will make an effort to actually click on the dynamic content if it is searching for tickets, or for hotels, or for dates, but it needs to be clear that it is actually there, and it's not a blank page like we have seen in the screenshots initially.

For step two, structure and signals,most of this, if not all of this, are actually from traditional old search. This is basic SEO hygiene that needs to be in place. For example, if the page takes a lot of time to load, AI is just going to skip it and go to another one. PageSpeed Insights, something that you can see, again, without having to be a technical person, Google has tools to do that. See if you are within the guidelines for the speed, time. If not, go back to your developer team and ask them, what can we do to improve it? Because that would be similar to that example as we saw in ChatGPT demo, where it said “I'm not going to load this because the images are too heavy.” Basic SEO tags should still be there, open graphs should still be there. Structured data is super, super important, because structured data should probably be actually first – well, second – on this list, after page loading time.

Structured data allows AI to understand and be able to read, and this is not just the ChatGPT or Perplexity. This has always been key for Google and will continue being key.

Structured data is as important as the sitemap that we talked about here. Based on the list of companies that registered for the webinar, you all have events, or some sort of content that does require that structured data. If you have never heard about structured data, google it, or ask ChatGPT, but Google has basically a manual, what types are available, and it is very easy for developers to, for your web team, to add it.

Semantic markup is also very important. Also, avoid unnecessary pagination where content is sort of hidden behind an extra click.

And now, finally, content. So, content is, of course, incredibly important. While keywords are not viewed the way they were in traditional search, they still remain important, so don't completely, fully disregard them, because they still become sort of a signal. You do need to have text content. AI can read images, AI can view images, and will watch videos. But still text is the first point of entry, so make sure that you do have descriptive content that talks about whatever you wanted to talk about. It needs to be clear. It doesn't need to be just marketing language, it needs to include information. Freshness is also something very important, because the way AI works now, it makes sure, and because it can, that this is the most recent content, and not some reference to 2016, we see this from time to time.

And another thing to keep in mind is that the context window will keep growing. So before, AI would be looking at a shorter amount of text to understand what it is about. Now, it can pretty much include a book kind of volume of text, and I'm oversimplifying.

This brings us to two streams for content. So, of course, absolutely continue doing all of the inspirational content for us humans. We still want to see the pictures, we still want to watch the videos, we still want that color and inspiration.

But also for humans and for machines, there needs to be informational content.

And that informational content needs to be specific. If you know about this, but it is not on the website, AI will never know what it is. And now, what's also possible, thanks to AI, and this is slightly different from the core topic of search, is that with all of the insights that you can get now, you can move past assumptions about what we think the user may want, but actually understand the real intent.

I continue saying that I think that we live in an amazing time, and that we now have the opportunity to connect with every customer, with every user, with every visitor, like never before.

 For those of you who attended the webinar that we did about a couple of months ago, we had a webinar where we looked at a sample of 15,000 questions from destination websites that people ask through the Intentful AI Assistant that is installed on the destination website. I am not going to repeat, all of that content, but I just want to say that this is a fantastic way to see what exactly people are interested in, and what they are asking about.

There is no PII attached, we do not collect personal information, so this is all anonymized, we don't know who these people are, but it still provides with so much depth of information in terms of what people seek when they come to your website. And again, I'm not going to go through every single question, but as you look through this, think about, and again, in the DMO context – does your website have the information that would allow AI to answer your question? Whether that is through the AI assistant installed on the website, or if it is when a ChatGPT AI bot comes to your website, or a Google comes to your website.

So, in case with the DMOs, people interact with AI as if they are asking a trusted local and not an AI system, and they talk about hours, they talk about parking, they talk about average costs, they talk about restaurants. They want details, they want information, and not just marketing inspiration. As you look through this, as you think through this, as you think through your content strategy, be as detailed as possible. And I know and I understand really well that this means that a lot of work needs to be done, but if you want to make sure that your visitor actually engages and finds the information, than that is the time to actually update all of the content. 

What's also happening, as I was mentioning at the very beginning, that the change is way beyond search, and that we as companies transition from speaking at customers (we are marketing broadcasts through websites or ads) to speaking with customers. 

So this is the transition that starts the two-way communication.

Summing up on the knowledge and content. So, once you figure out the discovery and make sure that AI does not see your website as a blank page, AI works with the knowledge that you publish. It breaks down information. Right now, it's chunking. This will change. As the context window becomes bigger, this is going to be different. But right now, it splits into smaller manageable chunks of text, and then it also understands the context, and then it puts it together, and so when someone asks a question, AI pulls those most relevant chunks and puts them into the response.

So, for you to make sure that you are included in those responses, make sure that a) you are discoverable, and b) that information is actually available on the website. And to decide the type of information, of course, use your professional knowledge, but also listen to the customers.

The content strategy for humans and machines is to continue balancing inspiration with information. Remember that people ask in-the-moment questions. This is also something that we see over and over, that people want to know what's happening right now. Someone is stuck in traffic, and they're asking the question to AI, assuming AI knows. 

So, especially, again, I know that there are a lot of DMOs on the website on the webinar today. Please update member pages. It is not enough just to have the restaurant name or the information about, you know, an event only by name. Include as much information, not just marketing language, but as much information as possible. Act like a trusted guide, think of it like a front desk guide, not just a marketer, and keep information current. This is becoming more and more important, because no one needs information that is from several years ago.

So, this is your checklist, and happy to connect and talk about this, more in detail, specific to, your particular company. But, basically, we structure this into four buckets:

1 - Discoverability, and I cannot stress this enough. You saw this in our examples or you can go to ChatGPT, activate agentic mode, see what it knows about you. 

2 - Make sure that the structure and signals are in place, that you have structured data, that you have the sitemap, and so on. Sit down with your web team, they know what needs to be done. For many of them, this is also relatively new, because they don't work with AI search every single day, so it's not that they did something wrong, absolutely not, but it is important that they also engage.

3 -  For content, include inspiration, and practical information. Look at the real user information, make sure the content is informative and has significant length, but that it is fresh and accurate. And then, keep in mind this transitioning from speaking at to speaking with.

4 - Continue seeing how AI describes your brand across multiple sources, not just your website.

At Intentful, we have two types of the products for our customers. One is aimed at the discoverability, so how AI interprets your brand or your destination. The program is called As Seen by AI, we just recently launched it. It is a 12-month program. We are currently working with several DMOs already. It is not a once-and-done thing because of how AI is changing, and it requires significant discovery and the number of changes that need to be done to the website to make sure that AI can actually see it.

And then the second one is how you can apply AI to engage users, and for that, we have a product, AI Suite, that includes AI assistant, generative response ads, where you can have a conversation with an ad, and the ad would respond back in real time. I'm absolutely thrilled about it and can talk about it for hours, but we don't have that time now. And then, also powered by that same AI that knows your brand, is a tool to build on-brand content. Please reach out, and we'll be happy to talk to you about that.

Please feel free to reach out through LinkedIn, or website, or by email, and happy to have a conversation, and wishing you the best of luck in optimizing your websites. Just keep in mind that this will continue changing as well, but the foundations don't change. If you had your brand optimized for SEO, that is already a very, very good step, to get optimized for AI search. Now, there is just so much more that needs to be done, but again, start with discoverability, make sure that AI can see your website. And take back control.

Thank you. I look forward to speaking with you soon.