Vogue Business Spotlights Azoma.ai

When Vogue Business set out to cover the seismic shift in how people discover products online, they zeroed in on one question: What happens to e-commerce when AI becomes the interface? We were proud to see Azoma.ai featured prominently in their investigation — not just as commentators, but as technical operators on the front lines of AI commerce.

In the piece, Vogue Business explored how tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Apple’s next-gen Safari are dismantling the search engine status quo, with Azoma's CEO Max Sinclair explaining how brands are unknowingly blocking AI agents and missing critical visibility opportunities. That kind of oversight is exactly why we founded Azoma: to help forward-thinking companies become visible, intelligible, and recommendable inside large language models.

2025 is being called the year online search changed forever — but the real transformation isn’t just in user behavior. It’s in how AI answers, and what that means for your product, your content, and your entire digital strategy.

Let’s break down what Vogue Business got right — and what every brand needs to know to stay relevant in this AI-native era.

From SEO to AIO: It’s No Longer Just Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are being replaced by answer engines. AI doesn’t just crawl keywords and backlinks — it generates product suggestions, comparisons, and recommendations using complex reasoning, world knowledge, and contextual understanding.

Brands are already feeling the impact:

• 42% of AI users get shopping advice from LLMs

• Organic traffic is down 25% year-on-year

• Embedded checkout flows (like the one OpenAI is testing in ChatGPT) may soon mean consumers never visit your site at all

This means traditional SEO is no longer enough. At Azoma.ai, we help clients transition to AIO (AI Optimization) — a discipline rooted in how LLMs interpret context, parse structure, and surface the most semantically relevant data.

Context Is the New Keyword

AI search is conversational. It’s shaped by intent, not just literal phrases. That requires brands to write content that:

• Anticipates user questions (FAQs, how-tos)

• Details use cases, not just features

• Clarifies who products are for, when they’re used, and why they matter

A product isn’t just “100% Italian leather.” It’s “a laptop-friendly leather tote designed for women navigating work, social, and travel — all in a single day.”

These context-rich narratives make your content legible to AI. The more detail you provide, the more accurately models can position your product in a relevant answer.

Technical Foundations: Make Sure LLMs Can Crawl You

As Max shared in the Vogue Business article, many brands — especially enterprise players — don’t realize their sites are blocking AI agents due to outdated code. A few quick wins we often recommend:

• Add an llms.txt file to make content accessible to AI crawlers

• Check robots.txt permissions and schema markup

• Optimize your HTML structure for machine parsing, not just human design

These are simple changes that unlock major AI discoverability gains — and they’re often overlooked.

Multimodal AI Means Your Images Matter More Than Ever

Modern AI doesn’t just read — it sees. Tools like Google Lens now account for one in four visual search queries, and models increasingly cross-reference visual content with text.

To perform well in AI-led commerce, your images must:

• Match your product descriptions

• Include all available colors and variants

• Show different angles, features, and in-use scenarios

• Include short-form video when possible

Keyword stuffing is dead. Visual accuracy is the new relevance signal.

Your Brand Reputation Is Now an AI Ranking Factor

Here’s what few are talking about: LLMs ingest off-site signals, including Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, Wikipedia mentions, and more. They construct a mental model of your brand based on public sentiment and presence — not just your website.

This is why we focus heavily on citation engineering at Azoma. We help clients increase brand mentions on authoritative, model-ingested platforms — shaping the very input space these LLMs rely on.

The Bottom Line: Visibility in the AI Economy Is Earned Differently

Vogue Business captured the stakes clearly: the companies that adapt quickly will win disproportionate visibility in the new AI-native commerce landscape. But it requires a shift in mindset:

• From keywords to concepts

• From SERPs to semantic recommendation

• From vanity traffic to model relevance

At Azoma.ai, we’re building the infrastructure and strategy to help brands thrive in this new reality — because AI isn’t just the future of search. It’s the future of how people discover everything.