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This guide covers how AI search affects B2B technology businesses: how it differs from Google, where it enters the buying process, how these tools decide which companies get named, and what you can do to influence that. It looks at what the shift means commercially ahead of the tactics behind it.
Published: 28 July 2026
Author: Adam Grant
AI search is the act of using an LLM like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini as a search engine. The definition is simple; what’s different is the user behaviour. Google is great when you want a destination: an ecommerce store, Netflix, a company’s careers page, where the value sits at the address you’re trying to reach. When you want information or a problem solved, AI search answers directly, with no scrolling past two pages of a stranger’s childhood to reach the recipe. It answers questions, works through problems and compares options against your specific circumstances.
This change can also be seen in the data. Similarweb’s 2026 landscape report found generative AI has widened how people look for information while most ChatGPT users still use Google alongside it. Combined search volume is growing, because people can now ask things they previously had no way to ask. So when your buyers start shortlisting vendors, will they work through ten blue links themselves, or ask a research partner that weighs the options and tells them which one fits?
Like Google, it starts at discovery: are you coming up when someone asks for the problem you solve? Visibility in AI answers turns into inbound leads.
LLMs also shape the rest of the buying journey. A prospect who arrived through another marketing channel uses AI to research you before agreeing to a first meeting, weigh you against the alternatives on their shortlist, and test whether your claims stand up. They’ll use it again as a strategic partner when your proposal is on the table next to a competitor’s. Every one of those moments is a point where the answer they read shapes the outcome.
Your website, your social channels, your directory listings; anyone researching you went there first. Now they ask an LLM. If you’re not shaping what it says, you’re being described by outdated pages, competitor comparisons, reviews and third-party write-ups. The market gets a version of you that you didn’t write.
Take a SaaS vendor with no pricing on its site. Someone asks for options under £500 a month. The model either leaves that vendor out entirely or pulls a figure from a third party that’s wrong.
AEO is the practice of optimising your earned and owned content to increase the percentage of times AI search tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini recommend your business.
AEO is also referred to as AI SEO, GEO and AIO. Different acronyms, same goal: increase the number of times a business is recommended by LLMs.
Tech buyers make AEO particularly consequential. They were among the earliest adopters of AI-assisted research and they use it consistently. When an IT buyer evaluates vendors, they’re asking detailed questions about categories, capabilities and which providers deserve a slot in the diary. Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey found that 89% of B2B buyers have adopted generative AI, naming it one of the top sources of self-guided information in every phase of the buying process. Our own poll of IT buyers, run across LinkedIn and our recent AEO webinar, put it at 86% (81 of 95 respondents) using AI tools to learn about IT solutions.
People search differently in AI tools, and that difference has left high-value IT searches sitting largely unclaimed. Winning “best CRM” is beyond most businesses. Shaping the answer for the specific, category-level questions your buyers actually ask is achievable now, at a cost that will rise as more vendors work it out. The buyers most likely to be evaluating you are the ones most likely to be using these tools to do it.
The value of SEO is increasing relevant traffic to your website. Some businesses have failed to see value from it because the traffic was never relevant, or because they couldn’t nurture and convert that traffic into leads.
The name may be similar, but AEO creates value differently. Rather than sending traffic to a generic landing page, it increases how often your business is recommended for a buyer’s hyper-specific needs. That produces little traffic and significant influence. Other sales and marketing tactics may deliver the first touchpoint, but buyers now evaluate solutions directly in AI tools, which makes AEO about controlling evaluation as much as discovery.
AI tools have no index of their own. When a buyer types a question, the tool breaks it into several related sub-queries, runs those through existing search engines, scrapes somewhere between 20 and 100 sources, and builds an answer from what it finds. All of that takes seconds. The consequence is simple: if you’re not in the scraped sources, you cannot be recommended. Getting into that pool is the entry fee. Three things then decide who gets named.
Is your brand listed somewhere in that fanout search? This could be your website, LinkedIn, YouTube, or third-party sites listing you: partner websites, directories and review platforms.
LLMs want to verify a source is legitimate. That’s decided by the depth of content on your own site, backlinks and mentions from credible domains, and the same message appearing consistently across separate verifiable third-party sources.
What counts as authority also shifts from industry to industry. AI leans heavily on directories and review sites for the IT services industry, for example.
A model spends less compute when it can lift an answer straight off the page instead of piecing one together. Clear headings, summary tables, FAQs and direct answers to specific questions get cited more often.
Those are the three main factors. There is no silver bullet or single set strategy. Strong SEO and strong external PR each work on their own. Businesses with excellent rankings and thin external coverage get recommended. So do businesses with heavy third-party coverage and mediocre rankings.
Yes, and in many technology niches you can move quickly. Adding your business to the right article or building a presence on the right authoritative source can start producing mentions in relevant answers within weeks rather than the years a competitive traditional search term demand.
We raised AI visibility for an IT services client from 1.7% to 23.9% in 10 weeks. Read the full case study.
Fewer than a paid search campaign of comparable investment, and that comparison misses what AEO does. The commercially significant effect is the readiness of the leads it produces.
A buyer who finds a business through AI-assisted research has typically completed a substantive evaluation before making contact. The AI tool has synthesised information from multiple sources, the buyer has reviewed and questioned those findings, and by the time they reach out they have a specific reason for interest, familiarity with what the business does, and often a degree of confidence that it is worth talking to.
The first conversation starts further forward. The buyer asks more specific questions, has fewer misconceptions to correct, and moves through the process faster. That shift has downstream effects:
AEO does not produce the same analytics trail as paid search or traditional SEO. There is no impression count for how often your business is mentioned in an AI-generated answer, and attribution from AI tool to website visit is not yet consistently trackable. Progress is still measurable.
For a fuller treatment of how to measure AEO impact over time, see How Do You Measure AEO Impact?
Your competitors are already appearing in AI answers for searches relevant to your business, most of them without having done anything deliberate to get there. They occupy those slots by accident of being better represented in the sources these tools reach for. AEO is early enough that the slots are still cheap to take, and that stops being true as more vendors work it out.
Visibility Wins works with technology companies to get their business recommended by LLMs like ChatGPT. The work starts with understanding how your buyers currently search, what questions they are asking, and where your business appears, or doesn’t, in the answers.
If you want to know where you currently stand, request a visibility audit.
Be The Brand AI Recommends
See where your brand appears in AI search, where your competitors are winning and what it takes to become the answer AI recommends
You can buy an ad slot; you can’t buy the answer. OpenAI opened a self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT, and those placements sit below the response, labelled as sponsored, on the free and lower-priced tiers. Paid placement and being named inside the answer are two different channels, and availability varies by country, so check current eligibility for the UK and Ireland before budgeting for it.
No. Search rankings are one of the inputs AI tools draw on when they fan a question out into sub-queries, so strong SEO makes you easier to find and cite. What changes is the goal. SEO works to bring a buyer to your site; AEO works to have your business named in an answer the buyer may never click through from.
Weeks rather than years in most technology categories, because the source pool for a specific B2B question is small enough that a few well-placed additions shift it. We moved one IT services client from 1.7% to 23.9% visibility in 10 weeks.
You can’t edit the model, so you change what it reads. Inaccurate answers almost always trace back to a specific source: an outdated page on your own site, a stale directory listing, a review site with the wrong pricing, or a competitor’s comparison page. Find the source, correct or outrank it, and the answer follows.
Yes, if you want to be cited. Blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and similar agents’ keeps your pages out of the pool these tools draw from. Some businesses block them to protect content from training use, which is a reasonable position to hold, though it costs you visibility in the answers your buyers are reading.
It works better there. A narrow category has fewer credible sources for a model to choose between, so the bar for inclusion is lower and a small number of authoritative mentions carries more weight. Broad, high-volume terms are where the effort stops paying back.
Start with whichever your buyers use, then widen. For most B2B technology firms that means ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Track the same prompts across each so you can see where visibility differs by tool.
Most of the early gains come from restructuring pages you already have. Adding clear headings, direct answers to specific questions and summary tables makes existing content easier for a model to lift. New content earns its place once you know which questions you’re absent from.
Growth Manager, Visibility Wins
Adam Grant leads the Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) team at Visibility Wins. Adam specialises in helping B2B IT companies become discoverable across Google and LLMs. His work focuses on building the content and authority signals that get brands recommended as trusted answers.