Mark Pearson on Getting Found, Chosen, and Paid by AI Agents — Agentic Commerce Comes to Small Business

🎧 Listen: Unscripted Small Business Podcast  |  📺 Watch: YouTube

This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Mark D. Pearson of Agent Buyable AI. Mark’s path runs from a Tony Robbins life-coaching certification to business coaching to AI consulting — and he’s now narrowed his whole offer to two things small businesses are about to need badly: getting found by AI and getting paid by AI. His tagline says it cleanly: “Get found, get chosen, get paid by AI.” The conversation covers the Stripe and OpenAI partnership that gave AI agents a wallet, why the bulk of agentic volume will be quiet B2B reorders, how to productize a service so an agent can read it, and why backlinks matter more than ever.

Two Offers: Get Found, and Get Paid

After years of broad AI audits — finding the one lever that moves revenue or profit for a small business — Mark narrowed to two needs created by the same shift. The first is AEO (answer engine optimization / LLM visibility), so AI finds and recommends you. The second is agentic commerce, so AI can actually pay you. He frames it as taking what enterprise consultancies like PwC are building at the top and adapting it down to the contractor and the chiropractor down the street.

Agents Now Have a Wallet

The technical core of the episode: the Stripe and OpenAI partnership, plus competing protocols — the Agentic Commerce Protocol from Stripe/OpenAI and Google’s Universal/Agentic Commerce Protocol — let AI agents complete purchases agent-to-agent. It’s live first at the enterprise and e-commerce layer (Home Depot, Lowe’s, Etsy, Wayfair, Coach, Urban Outfitters, Kate Spade; Shopify storefronts; Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal rails). Mark’s entire business is bridging that capability down to the small business two ways: agents that book appointments straight onto your calendar, and agents that transact, protected by Visa-grade cryptographic safety rails.

“SEO has graduated into the agentic world… AEO is an evolution of SEO. And as you do really good SEO, you are doing AEO.” — Mark Pearson

The US Is Lagging China

Mark’s most vivid example: in China, Alibaba paired with Qwen lets you say “plan a two-week trip to Shanghai under five thousand dollars,” and it researches the trip, books travel (including BYD self-driving cars), checks the weather, and offers to buy you a raincoat — purchasing products and services on your behalf. The US has the safety rails in place but is behind on that consumer-facing experience. The window for small businesses to get ready is now, before the demand arrives.

Productize Your Service So an Agent Can Read It

For small businesses, the real work is turning fuzzy services into agent-readable catalogs. A chiropractor productizes a “10-pack of back cracks and neck tweaks” on Shopify. A paving contractor assigns SKUs and schema to its top services — driveways, sidewalks, pavers to the front door — with the descriptors that matter (like plow-rated weight). Agents strip out the human “fluff” and read the structured product data cleanly. That forces the engineering and marketing roles — historically separate in big companies — together, even for a one- or two-person shop.

Be Everywhere Recent — Recency Builds AI Trust

Because Gemini, GPT, Perplexity and the rest each have their own retrieval algorithm, Mark advises spreading accurate brand signals across many surfaces — your site, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, socials — so the AI cross-references and trusts you. Recency and consistency are the trust builders: frequent reviews for a local shop (a QR code on the counter), consistent blogging, recent citations. He ties it to Jeremy’s Chevron “Project Kilby” anecdote — a press release that forgot to name the brand or link the site, a wasted citation opportunity. If you’re going to earn a mention, make sure it actually names and links you.

Backlinks Still Matter — AEO Is Evolved SEO

On Jeremy’s deliberately “controversial” backlinks question, Mark is unequivocal: backlinks are “hyper relevant, even more so.” LLMs lean on Google and Bing organic results — which use links as authority proxies — during retrieval, so good SEO foundations directly enable AEO. For small businesses building that foundation, SEO Arcade’s local marketing resource guide covers the location-page and citation fundamentals that LLMs read.

The Human Note: Don’t Give It Full Agency

Mark’s hot take is about cognitive offloading. AI sits people on a precipice between creating and consuming. The danger isn’t using AI — it’s surrendering your agency to it (the belly-on-the-couch consumer whose AI orders the pizza). His belief: humans are built to create, and AI used as a tool makes us incredible creators — but cross-reference its sources like a reporter, because it hallucinates. Use the AI to create; don’t let it run your life.

Connect with Mark Pearson

Mark runs Agent Buyable AI — AEO and agentic-commerce consulting for small and medium businesses. Find him as Mark D. Pearson (Mark with a K, middle initial D) on LinkedIn.

🎧 Listen to the full episode  |  📺 Watch on YouTube