Optimizing brand content for AI search and agentic traffic
As its own first customer, Akamai increased citations by 85% and brand presence by 364%
AI bot traffic grew more than 300% year over year

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As more people turn to AI to search and navigate the internet, Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM) today introduced AI Brand Presence to help organizations optimize their content for AI search and traffic. AI Brand Presence enables businesses to automatically translate their website content for LLM search and AI agents, while monitoring bot activity and providing security at the edge.

Consumers are increasingly engaging with brands through AI-generated search answers rather than direct website visits. The AI intermediary means fewer human visits and more bot activity on company websites. Akamai recently observed a 300% annual increase in AI bot traffic, and studies have found that nearly 60% of searches now end without a click. This seismic shift in internet behavior is breaking long-established marketing funnels, while introducing new risks around the veracity and visibility of information that's retrieved and shared by LLMs.

"The assumptions underpinning 20 years of digital strategy are breaking down in real time. We're witnessing one of the most significant shifts in digital history, a move from human-driven search to machine-mediated discovery," said Patrick Sullivan, CTO of Security Strategy at Akamai. "Businesses face the risk of digital invisibility. If you're not the primary source of truth for the AI models your customers trust, you effectively don't exist."

Purpose-built for the AI-driven web

Akamai AI Brand Presence combines two core capabilities:

AI-optimized context delivery: AI Brand Presence translates a website's information into a format that AI can easily understand. This process happens automatically in the background, requires no back-end updates, and has no impact on the human visitor experience.
Visibility and insights: A single dashboard reveals which AI models are visiting a site and what content they are consuming. It also tracks how those AI interactions turn into real traffic and customer engagement.

Together, these capabilities enable brands to build an AI-first digital presence, ready for how users are beginning to discover, decide, and transact through AI across commerce and beyond. This approach is known as generative engine optimization (GEO).

Delivering outcomes across marketing and digital teams

With Akamai AI Brand Presence, businesses can:

Help AI platforms accurately represent their brand, products, and messaging
Increase visibility in AI-generated responses and recommendations
Understand how AI systems interact with their content and influence traffic
Adapt content strategies based on real-time AI consumption patterns
Control how and where content is surfaced across AI ecosystems

Unlike traditional optimization approaches, AI Brand Presence operates at the edge, enabling real-time adaptation of content delivery without requiring back-end changes and disrupting existing workflows or the human visitor experience.

Owning the narrative

Akamai was the first customer for AI Brand Presence, piloting the technology on its own global website. By serving an AI-ready version of the site alongside the "human" one, Akamai made its information significantly easier for machines to digest, shrinking massive data loads by 99%. This shift away from traditional search produced immediate results: an 85% increase in citations and a 364% surge in brand presence for general searches where the brand wasn't even mentioned by name. In ChatGPT alone, Akamai's presence jumped 133% compared to competitors, demonstrating that actively managing how LLMs see a brand can be critical to ensuring the right message reaches the customer.

"As marketers, we can't afford to be passive observers of the AI shift; we must drive the change we want to see. We spent years building our brand, but if we don't guide how AI models find and share our content, we're essentially giving up control over our own reputation," said Kim Salem-Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer, Akamai. "By testing this technology on our own site first, we proved that brands can reclaim their narrative. The criteria for a great website have changed. In addition to providing an exceptional human user experience, you need to optimize your site for AI comprehension and retrieval so that you're the source that AI trusts for its answers. With the launch of AI Brand Presence, we're giving marketers the keys to their digital identity again, making sure their brand shows up correctly every time."

Built for the future of agentic interactions

AI Brand Presence builds on Akamai's broader strategy to support the evolving AI ecosystem, where autonomous agents increasingly act on behalf of users. By combining AI-optimized delivery with deep visibility into AI traffic, Akamai is enabling brands to better understand and influence how they are represented in these emerging interactions.

Akamai AI Brand Presence will be available in limited availability through a phased rollout, beginning with select customers in North America.

For more information, visit https://www.akamai.com/products/ai-brand-presence.

About Akamai

Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai's full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world's most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence. Learn more at akamai.com and akamai.com/blog, or follow Akamai Technologies on X and LinkedIn.

Contacts

Akamai Media Relations

akamaipr@akamai.com

Akamai Investor Relations

invrel@akamai.com

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This press release was published by a CLEAR® Verified individual.