How to Structure Content for AI Search Discovery
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Empowering the AI-First Marketer with Optimizely Opal
Nov 17, 2025 • 5 Minute Read • Doug Yoder, Technical Director
The AI-productivity soundtrack continues to play on loop. Yet for most marketers, the real challenge isn't access to AI. It's in adoption.
At the same time, the marketplace is overflowing with new tools and promises of instant productivity. This means that many digital and marketing teams are hitting a wall of experimentation without proper orchestration.
Without that orchestration, AI can produce faster, but not necessarily smarter, unless you know how to train and coordinate it systematically. That's where Agentic AI and platforms like Optimizely Opal come in.
The Shift to Agentic AI & Orchestration
AI becomes exponentially more powerful when it's not working alone.
Agentic AI builds upon generative AI, offering a system of intelligent agents that can act, learn, and collaborate autonomously within your marketing ecosystem.
Optimizely Opal brings this next phase to life, enabling teams to design and orchestrate agents across their digital experience stack. Instead of prompting one model at a time, marketers can deploy a network of agents that work together to plan, create, test, and optimize.
In a recent Optimizely webinar citing McKinsey & Company research, they present the leap in productivity using AI:
- Marketers using generative AI can increase productivity by 1.2x.
- Those leveraging individual agents can double it by 2x.
- However, teams orchestrating multiple connected agents can achieve up to 20 times the productivity gains.
The AI Learning Curve is Worth It
Building and training AI isn't a plug-and-play process. Teams need to invest time upfront to understand how agents think, interact, and adapt. We must accept that there will be trial and error and that workflows will evolve, which is exactly how innovation happens.
AI maturity follows the same pattern we've seen with every major digital shift. The early adopters who commit to learning, experimenting, and refining are the ones who ultimately get ahead.
The real payoff from AI investments comes later, when the technology begins to operate as a connected ecosystem rather than a collection of experiments.
That payoff is time saved, as well as strategic clarity, which brings a bigger return. With orchestrated agents, marketers gain a clearer picture of what's working and the agility to act on it faster.
Building the AI-First Marketing Stack
At Verndale, we've spent the past year exploring how to make Agentic AI practical for marketing teams. The result of that has been three Opal agents that demonstrate what's possible in transforming manual tasks into intelligent, automated disciplines.
1. Trending Insights Content Agent (CMP & CMS Integration)
Every marketer needs more content, but beyond volume, the value and quality are foundational when feeding your AI input.
Our Trending Insights Content Agent integrates directly with Optimizely content marketing platform (CMP) or content management system (CMS) to help teams brainstorm, draft, and optimize content more efficiently.
Here's what makes it different: the agent scans dynamic sources to identify emerging trends, then surfaces uniques takes or viewpoints that haven't been covered yet. From there, it automatically drafts your blog post and saves it in the CMP for editorial review.
It automates topic discovery, research synthesis for a unique viewpoint, and first-draft creation, all in one seamless process.
While content generation isn't the biggest time-saver on its own, it’s foundational, and determining a unique viewpoint to avoid more of the same provides real value to readers.
2. Behavioral CRO Agent (Scoring Framework)
Conversion optimization is always a balance of art and science. It takes time, expertise, and iteration to understand what a page conveys and how it affects people's feelings or actions.
Behavior Scientist BJ Fogg teaches that conversion depends on a number of subliminal, subconscious concerns that web pages need to address to be successful conversions engines. That's why we developed a Behavioral CRO Agent that brings that balance to life with AI automation.
To know if you've ticked all the boxes on a new landing page, a quick URL check with our agent will highlight the good and the bad of what visitors may be experiencing before clicking on calls-to-action (CTA) or completing a form. The agent transforms a Decision Factors framework into a structured knowledge source that informs itself to serve as a conversion intelligence assistant.
For example, users can prompt the agents with any webpage URL, and Opal evaluates it against a detailed set of design and psychological principles that influence conversion, both overt and subliminal.
Each run produces a table-based evaluation that provides numeric scores for the page across key factor areas and subcategories, including:
- Attention & Focus: Attention Capture, Focus Orientation, Focus Engagement
- Motivation & Validation: Safety & Security, Concern Understanding, Concern Validation
- Enablement & Empowerment: CTA Simplicity, CTA Clarity, CTA Access
Additionally, the system explains the scores by referencing specific visual elements and on-page language, delivering a clear example-based rationale for every assessment.
It's built with robust error handling and explicit stop conditions to ensure clean, reliable output. If a site blocks access or the browsing step fails, the agent automatically stops and reports the failure, avoiding misleading results.
The assessment cycle is simple yet delivers powerful insights that scale expert-grade CRO assessments that can be replicated across pages.
3. Lead Scoring Agent (CRM Integration for Automating Inbound Lead Qualification)
Most teams lose momentum to manual research, enrichment, and routing. Our Lead Scoring Agent automates this critical process from end to end. It can connect to your customer relationship management (CRM) system to ensure every inbound opportunity receives the right response, quickly. The agent determines revenue, location, and industry automatically based on a lead's email domain, instantly qualifying or marking it as non-qualified inside the CRM. From there, it routes to the correct sales rep, BDR, or customer service agent.
When a lead comes in, every minute counts. Just as important is automated enrichment, which enforces cleaner CRM data and strengthens downstream analytics, forecasting, and attribution.
How to Become an AI-First Marketer
Agentic AI enables the kind of automation that speeds up processes and sharpens the entire sales and marketing engine. If you can dream of a world where your repetitive, manual tasks get automated, then Agentic AI can help get you there.
The difference between curiosity and impact lies in your approach to orchestration. Ultimately, when you start connecting agents across your marketing ecosystem, insights compound and automation scales.
To get there, you need a roadmap and a partner who's already walked the path. And we've laid the groundwork with Optimizely Opal to help marketing teams build AI readiness.
Our approach combines technical expertise, strategic consulting, and real-world testing to help organizations bridge their strategy with orchestration. Here's how we help:
- Identify where AI agents can drive the most value
- Build, train, and connect those agents within Opal
- Develop a scalable orchestration model that evolves with your business
Agentic AI in Optimizely Opal represents the foundation of a new marketing model that multiplies impact.
Ready to explore what AI orchestration could be like for your marketing team?
Let's connect. We'll show you how to move from using AI in siloes to leading it across your department.