If a buyer asked ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Mode to recommend a company like yours tomorrow morning, would your name come up? For a growing number of B2B businesses the answer is no, and nobody inside the company knows, because nothing in the analytics dashboard records a conversation you were never part of.
This article covers where buyers now do their early research, why being absent from an AI answer costs more than a lost click, how to test your own visibility in ten minutes, and what a serious fix involves.
Key takeaways
- 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google (G2, April 2026).
- Buyers choose from the vendors on their day-one shortlist 95% of the time (6sense, 2025). If you are missing from that list, you rarely get a second chance.
- AI assistants lean heavily on what other people say about you. Branded web mentions correlate far more strongly with AI Overview visibility than backlinks do (Ahrefs, 75,000 brands).
- You can check your own position today with five buyer questions and four AI tools.
- Fixing it is a 6 to 12 month programme that joins technical SEO, content, digital PR and measurement.
Where Do B2B Buyers Start Their Research Now?
In April 2026, G2 surveyed 1,076 B2B software buyers. 51% said they now begin research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% in G2’s report a year earlier. 71% use an AI chatbot at some point in the process, and 69% said they had chosen a different vendor from the one they planned to buy because of a chatbot’s recommendation.
That last figure deserves a second read. Seven in ten buyers have changed their mind about a supplier because of an answer generated by a machine.
None of this means Google has stopped mattering. StatCounter puts Google’s share of worldwide search engine use at just under 90% in September 2026. What has changed is where the answer appears. Google now places AI Overviews above the results on a large share of searches, and Pew Research Center found that people clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary was shown, against 15% when it was not. Whether your buyer uses ChatGPT or Google, the answer increasingly arrives before anyone visits a website.
Why Does Being Left Out Cost More Than It Used To?
In the old model, a weak search ranking cost you traffic. Someone on page two could still be found by a buyer willing to scroll. An AI answer has no page two. It names a handful of companies and moves on.
6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report, based on nearly 4,000 buyers, found that buyers make first contact with a seller around 61% of the way through their journey, and that they choose from the vendors on their day-one shortlist 95% of the time. 94% of those buyers use large language models somewhere in the buying process.
Put those findings together and the risk becomes clear. The shortlist is increasingly drawn up inside an AI conversation. If you are absent from it, the opportunity never appears in your CRM as a lost deal. It simply never exists, and your sales team spends the quarter wondering why inbound has gone quiet.
For a CEO, that is a pipeline problem that looks like a sales problem. For an investor, it is a risk to any growth plan that assumes inbound demand will keep arriving at the rate it did two years ago.
Why Do Good Companies Get Left Out of AI Answers?
In our experience, the businesses that go missing are rarely weak businesses. They usually fall into one or more of four gaps.
1. The engines cannot read or understand the website
Pages that render badly, missing structured data, and a vague description of what the company does all make it harder for a machine to say with confidence who you are and who you serve. If the assistant is unsure, it names someone else.
2. Nothing on the site answers the questions buyers ask
Many B2B websites are written to impress, or to rank for a handful of keywords chosen years ago. Buyers ask AI assistants plain questions, such as which supplier suits a firm of their size, what a service costs, or how long it takes. If your content does not answer those questions clearly, there is nothing for the assistant to quote.
3. Nobody else is talking about you
This is the gap that surprises people. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that branded web mentions had a correlation of 0.664 with visibility in Google’s AI Overviews, against 0.218 for backlinks. 26% of the brands studied had no AI Overview mentions at all. Muck Rack’s analysis of more than a million links cited by AI tools found that over 89% came from earned media, meaning sources the brand did not pay for or write itself.
In plain terms, the assistants trust what credible third parties say about you more than what you say about yourself. A strong website with no outside coverage is easy to overlook.
4. Your story changes depending on where it is told
When your website, your LinkedIn page, your directory listings and your press coverage each describe the business differently, the assistants struggle to summarise you. Mixed signals tend to produce vague answers, or no mention.
How Can You Check Whether AI Recommends Your Business?
You do not need a tool or an agency to get a first read. Set aside ten minutes and follow these steps.
- Write down five questions your best-fit buyer would ask before they know your company exists. For example, “best [your category] provider for [your customer type] in the UK”.
- Ask each question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Mode.
- Ask each one more than once. Research by SparkToro and Gumshoe found the odds of an AI tool giving the same list of brands twice are under 1 in 100, so a single answer is only a snapshot.
- Record three things each time: whether you were named, which sources the assistant cited, and which companies appeared instead of you.
If you are named, look closely at the cited sources, because those pages are doing the work for you and some of them may not be yours. If you are not named, the companies that were are your real competitive set in the eyes of the buyer. It is often a different list from the one in your board pack.
What Does It Take to Fix?
A credible fix joins four disciplines that are usually bought separately, which is a large part of why so many businesses stall.
- Technical foundations, so every engine can crawl, render and understand the site, including structured data that states clearly what you do and for whom.
- Content built around real buyer questions. Our team uses AI where it speeds up research and structure, while experienced people write, edit and check every piece. Google’s own guidance warns that generating large volumes of pages with AI and no added value can breach its spam policies, so the human part is not optional.
- Digital PR to earn mentions in the publications, lists and sites the assistants already trust in your category. This is long-standing PR craft aimed at a new audience, and it sits at the centre of how we approach AEO.
- Measurement across Google and the AI assistants, tracking how often you are named across a fixed set of buyer questions over time, rather than a single ranking.
Expect this to take 6 to 12 months to show its full effect. Technical fixes can land quickly. Earned coverage and authority build more slowly, and they compound. In the work our SEO and AEO team is doing with clients now, the first movement usually shows up in visibility on the questions closest to a buying decision, followed by better-informed enquiries. We are glad to walk you through the client results behind that statement in a meeting, with the reporting in front of you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?
AEO is the work of making your business the source that AI assistants and AI search features quote and recommend when buyers ask questions in your category. It covers technical set-up, content written to be quoted, and third-party coverage that gives the assistants reasons to trust you.
Is AEO different from SEO?
They overlap heavily. Classic SEO still matters because Google remains the largest search engine by a wide margin, and many AI tools draw on web search results. AEO adds a stronger focus on clear answers, entity clarity, earned media and measurement across several AI tools at once.
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT’s answers?
Organic recommendations in AI answers are earned through the quality and consistency of what is published by you and about you. That is why digital PR and content quality carry so much weight.
How long does AEO take to work?
Plan on 6 to 12 months for a meaningful, lasting change. Some technical improvements show sooner, while authority built through content and coverage takes longer and compounds over time.
Talk to Us
Would it be worth a short Teams or Zoom meeting with myself and my co-founder Zafar Shah? We will look at where you appear today across Google and the main AI assistants, show you who is being named in your place, and set out what it would take to change that. If you are in good shape, we will tell you so.
Remora is the go-to-market and value-creation consultancy for founders, CEOs and investors. Our SEO and AEO team works as part of your value-creation team, not as a supplier of keyword reports. Start the conversation at teamremora.com.
Sources
- G2, The Answer Economy research, 15 April 2026 (1,076 B2B software buyers)
- 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report
- StatCounter Global Stats, search engine market share, September 2026
- Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears, 22 July 2025
- Ahrefs, AI Overview brand correlation study of 75,000 brands, 26 May 2025
- Muck Rack, Generative Pulse report, July 2025
- SparkToro and Gumshoe study, reported by Search Engine Land, 28 January 2026
- Google Search Central, guidance on using generative AI content
