Join Jason Barnard, Beatrice Gamba, and Laurence O’Toole for a live Assistive Agent Optimization (AAO) strategy roundtable.

Scheduled for 17 March 2026 at 17 H CET (Paris)

Don’t miss this!

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Assistive Agent Optimization Is Coming: The Strategy to Start in 2026

SEO continues to evolve, and generative search was always a transition. The next phase is Assistive Agent Optimization (AAO): search engines present choices, assistive engines make recommendations, and AI agents make decisions. The shift from recommendation to decision is already underway.

Many organizations still treat this shift as distant. In practice, the groundwork needs to start now. The brands that establish clear signals, structured knowledge, and measurable visibility today will be the ones AI systems reference and recommend tomorrow. Those that delay will be forced into reactive catch-up.

In 2026, three costs of inaction are already visible:

• Doubt  - prospects discover the brand but lack confidence to convert
• Displacement  - AI systems surface competitors instead
• Absence  - the brand is not mentioned at all in AI-mediated journeys

Every strategy in this session addresses those problems today while building the foundation for AAO tomorrow.

This session brings together three complementary perspectives: brand clarity, technical structure, and measurement and optimization. Each recommendation delivers value now (better rankings, stronger conversions, clearer brand signals) while preparing your organization for an agent-driven discovery environment. Three legs of the same stool.

Speakers

Jason Barnard (Kalicube®) 

Jason Barnard (Kalicube®) built the Kalicube Pro™ platform, which tracks 73 million brand profiles across 25 billion data points to measure how AI systems understand, trust, and recommend brands. He coined Brand SERP in 2012, Answer Engine Optimization in 2017, and Assistive Agent Optimization in 2025. His research underpins the methodology: if AI systems cannot confidently understand who you are and trust what you claim, technical optimisation alone will not compensate.

Beatrice Gamba (WordLift) 

Beatrice Gamba (WordLift) leads innovation at WordLift and has spent nearly a decade deploying enterprise knowledge graphs for organisations including EssilorLuxottica and L’Oréal. Her focus is the technical and semantic layer that makes digital content interpretable by machines. She brings the infrastructure piece: her focus is the technical and semantic layer that makes digital content interpretable by machines. Structured knowledge creates the conditions necessary for accurate interpretation, integration, and future interoperability possible.

Laurence O’Toole (Authoritas)

Laurence O’Toole (Authoritas) founded Authoritas in 2006 and has more than twenty years of experience building enterprise SEO technology and analytics platforms for brands including TKMaxx, DailyMail, Cdiscount, WarnerBros and Verizon. He addresses the central executive question: If LLM’s are probability machines then how do you measure success and how does visibility in AI-mediated environments connect to measurable business outcomes?

Practical Takeaways You Can Apply Now

Brand Foundation (Kalicube®)

• Entity Home optimization: How to identify and strengthen the single URL that AI systems treat as your source of truth; why this determines whether AI trusts your claims or hedges.
• Knowledge Graph auditing: How to check your presence in Google’s Knowledge Graph and Wikidata; why these are proxies for how all AI systems anchor entity understanding.
• Cross-platform brand testing: How to systematically test what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude say about your brand; why inconsistency between platforms signals a Doubt Tax problem.
• Corroboration mapping: How to audit which third-party sources confirm your key brand claims; why uncorroborated claims get hedged or ignored by AI.
• UCD scoring: How to measure Understandability, Credibility and Deliverability separately; why fixing them in that order prevents wasted effort.

Technical Infrastructure (WordLift)

• Implement structured data and entity-based content modelling so AI agents can read your content natively, not approximately.
• Connect your knowledge graph to your existing content assets so every page becomes machine-actionable, not just machine-readable.
• Build structured, governed access to your site and data now so future agent standards can be adopted without reengineering.
• Define the core entities of your business (brand, products, services, people, and topics) and align their definitions across content, structured data, and internal systems to reduce ambiguity in how machines interpret your organisation.
• Establish content governance workflows that maintain structured data over time, ensuring updates to products, services, and brand information remain coherent and machine-interpretable as content evolves.

Measurement and Accountability (Authoritas)

• How to create a rigorous and methodical research framework to underpin your strategy: Creating Prompt Sets; Good Sources of Prompt Data; Types of Prompts; Customising Prompts; and why ‘Prompt Volumes’ are a load of baloney.
• LLMs are probabilistic - why rankings in AI Search interfaces are going to be an unreliable metric:  What to measure instead of rankings and what not to measure when tracking AEO performance.
• AI chatbots personalise results - how to get accurate and useful data that you can build an AEO/GEO my strategy on?  Which AI search engines/LLMs to track; Tracking via UI vs APIs; Hidden Network Requests (Query Reformulation, Hidden URLs, Shopping and Local data); Languages and geographical differences.
• Optimizing your site and content for success in AEO; Site structure and speed;  Content performance tracking; Winning content formats; Digital PR & 3rd party corroboration of your claims in RAG and Training data.
• Content was King, now Context is King: How can you contextually enrich your content to create more useful data for humans, bots and agents.
• Tracking AEO performance and contribution to sales: Analytics & UTM parameters; Bing Webmaster Tools; Log Analysis; LLM response tracking. 

Organized by Kalicube®, Wordlift, and Authoritas.