Introducing BrandAPI: A New Way to Think About Find-ability in the Agentic Age

The BrandAPI is a concept, not a thing you build.

“What’s the role of my website if people are just going to get an AI-generated search result?” This is a valid question, and one that many in our industry have answered with something like “the website’s dead, brands should put all their focus on [hot new thing].”

Drake Cooper has been thinking hard about this question too. And we’re coming with an alternative viewpoint.

First, the Ugly Truth

For 30+ years, the free and open internet has been the foundation upon which all modern commerce was built. It’s fueled innovation and become so central to our culture that it kinda gets overlooked, the way oxygen does. But the honest truth—it’s getting squeezed. It’s a fact that organic traffic is dropping (and will likely continue to). Most searches start with Google, and it’s in Google’s best interest to keep users engaged in its platform.

According to a 2026 study, fewer than 28% of all Google searches made it to the open web. In 2025, Pew Research found that users were about half as likely to click on a blue link if an AI Overview was present, and only about 1% of users clicked a link inside an AI Overview.

It’s easy to look at this data and conclude that the website doesn’t matter anymore. But in reality, all those zero-click search features and AI Overviews have to be sourced from somewhere.

What is BrandAPI?

An API is a tool that allows software to make itself available and useful to other systems that it doesn’t control. As the world of websites and applications grew, developers realized we needed a way for these platforms to easily communicate and integrate with each other. APIs do this through “endpoints” which are structured levers that can be used to interact with the API. Today, APIs are used in virtually every piece of technology. This is a helpful metaphor for the way brands need to think.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting a literal “API for brands”. Instead, I’m proposing a methodology and evaluation framework to help us see the full scope of how a brand needs to communicate and integrate with algorithms and agents that it doesn’t control.

The BrandAPI is a concept, not a thing you build. It’s a way of seeing your presence. Nobody is asking you to ship a REST API. (Some of you should expose a product feed—more on that later—but that’s a tactic under the concept, not the concept itself.)

The website is not the BrandAPI. The website is one of many “surfaces” and the BrandAPI™ is the framework we use to evaluate what’s exposed across all of them. Conflating the two is the fastest way to misuse this.

Brands that structure themselves like APIs will win Findability™ in the agentic age.

The Endpoints of a Brand

When we mapped what people and machines actually query a brand for, it came down to seven things:

The Evaluation Framework

Using the seven endpoints, we’ve developed a framework to evaluate and map brands across eight different “surfaces” and four scoring lenses. This approach shows us the “shape” of a brand and provides clear and actionable areas for improvement.

To build that shape, we evaluate a brand across several “surfaces” like owned website(s), wikis, social media, business profiles, third-party retail, trade orgs and directories, media coverage, user-generated reviews, and presence in AI models. We look at each of these things through four lenses:

Ownability: Could this belong to anyone else? Remove the logo; does anything still say it’s you?
Consistency: Does it match everywhere? Or has each surface drifted from the hub in its own direction?
Value: Is it compelling? Does it survive compression to a sentence?
Machine legibility: Can a machine read, trust, and act on it?

The Website’s Role

Coming back to the foundational question of its role in the modern digital ecosystem, a brand’s website is the hub of its presence. It’s the canonical source, the thing every other surface either mirrors correctly or drifts away from. When your Google Business Profile disagrees with your site, the site is right, and the profile is broken. When a model describes your product incorrectly, the fix starts on your product description pages.

And it remains the most effective medium a brand has to express itself. No character limit. No algorithm decides who sees it. No template imposed by a platform. No landlord can change the terms. Every other surface you show up on is rented; the website is the one you own.