One-third of B2B software buyers now purchase from a vendor they’d never even heard of before, because AI answered the question and named the company for them. More than 70% of AI-powered search users start by asking about a category rather than a specific company, and McKinsey projects that shift will move $750 billion in U.S. revenue through AI-powered search by 2028. Every company competing for a share of that money now has to earn its way into an answer, one that’s increasingly given without your company’s name ever being asked for.

Listen to “33% of B2B Buyers Never Heard Your Company’s Name” (Audio Deep Dive)

AI has revolutionized the way we search—more precisely, how we research what we need to buy.

What used to be based on brand or company name has been rerouted to questions based on a category, e.g., who’s the best at X, or give me the top five for Y. AI answers that directly—“best fleet management software,” “top orthopedic surgeon near [city]”—and recommends a company by name inside that answer. The branded search step gets bypassed entirely.

The user searching your category or services never even needs to type in your name because AI already did the confirming for them. McKinsey’s research on AI search confirms that this isn’t a trend; rather, it’s already the reality: more than 70% of AI-powered search users now ask their questions at the top of the funnel, learning about a category before ever narrowing the search down to a specific company, a shift McKinsey projects will move $750 billion in U.S. revenue through AI-powered search by 2028.

“Research found that, at 17.1%, GenAI chatbots are the single biggest influence on which vendors make a buyer’s shortlist, ahead of every other channel, including the vendor’s own site.”

A recent study, “The Answer Economy: How AI Search Is Rewiring B2B Software Buying,” shows that B2B buyers are following the same path. It found that 69% of buyers ended up choosing an entirely different vendor than they’d originally planned, based on what an AI chatbot told them, and that one in three, or 33%, ended up buying from a vendor they weren’t previously familiar with.

If your sales or lead numbers have started slipping, or are about to, the cause may have nothing to do with your marketing; rather, it’s that the buying decision has upended the traditional marketing funnel, due to a category query AI answers before your brand or company name ever comes up. Nor is your digital footprint visible to AI, if it was never built to capture the attention of LLMs about what makes your company different.

AI Decides Who Gets to Compete for the Sale

What’s striking here is that the purchase decision is being made without certain brands ever getting the chance to compete for it. The same McKinsey study found that 40%-55% of consumers researching consumer electronics, groceries, travel, wellness, apparel, beauty and financial services are already using AI-based search to guide their purchasing decisions—and that number has almost certainly grown since that study was published.

We’ve already been trained to think this way, decades before AI made it universal. One of the earliest online travel booking sites, Travelocity, launched in 1996. Kayak followed in 2004, built specifically as a metasearch tool, because customers wanted price and schedule comparisons across airlines, not loyalty to one booking site. Some people did use Travelocity for loyalty points toward a preferred airline or hotel, but the premise was never built on brand-specific loyalty. It was a “price and schedule first, brand name second” shift, three decades before AI made that the standard default.

Amazon runs on the same logic today. We search based on a need, a price or a review—e.g., “the best cordless drill under $100,” “a gift for a 10-year-old who likes crafts”—and we’re rarely, if ever, thinking about a specific brand. We’re simply scanning the AI-generated list and the reviews.

Which brings us back to this previous post: it’s not us forming an opinion about a company, product or service first; it’s AI. Whatever you say about your company or its reputation, if it isn’t being cited, it stays invisible—to AI, and to you.

AI Is Determining the Purchase Shortlist

Two separate studies confirm this. G2’s research found that, at 17.1%, GenAI chatbots are the single biggest influence on which vendors make a buyer’s shortlist, ahead of every other channel, including the vendor’s own site. 6sense’s research found that that shortlist is typically locked in before the buyer ever contacts a seller, and that the early frontrunner wins the deal most of the time.

The question CFOs and CMOs should be asking is: “If AI is determining that the decision is already made, what exactly is your SEO budget paying for?”

It’s a valid question, and one that doesn’t have an easy answer without the insight and data showing whether your brand is even being cited. Last week, I sat through two webinars from two technology platforms, both of which were focused on making websites more visible to AI. The presentations—even their decks—were nearly identical, and they were correct on several technical points that do help raise a brand’s visibility with LLMs: page speed, page structure and schema markup, all of which help LLMs scrawl through and read a page. But because both companies focused entirely on technology to improve site visibility, they omitted something that we’ve covered across several of our last posts: highly-cited sites get cited five times more than low-cited ones, driven mostly by mentions, reviews and how a company is talked about elsewhere online—not by the website, but by third-party sites and platforms. Both platforms missed the more important question: “How will an LLM find what the digital space is already saying about you if you’re not cited in it?”

One presenter’s session boiled the whole idea down to a simple line worth repeating: AI acts like word of mouth. It repeats back what’s already being said about a company, whether that’s good, bad, or missing entirely.

With AI, Trust Is the New Brand Currency

If most AI-powered search questions start at the category level, long before a specific company enters the conversation, how does a company ensure that it’s not just its products, services and pricing being cited, but also its hard-earned reputation? That question circles back to something I’ve written about before and keeps proving itself: the story a company is proudest of is often the one AI knows least. AI search and visibility isn’t just a matter of a platform auditing your site’s technical structure for AI. That’s important, but it still takes real human effort to surface the customer insight sitting inside different departments of a company, and then to shape that insight into content that lives not just on your website, but on the third-party sites, review platforms and press coverage AI actually pulls from.

Then there’s the financial impact. Branded search used to be the last step of a buying journey, meaning someone already had you in mind and searched your name to confirm or navigate to your website. Now, AI answers the prompt directly and recommends a company by name inside its own answer, sidestepping brands that may be just as relevant, or even the category leader. Branded search volume isn’t declining because of weak performance marketing; rather, it’s declining because of a lack of citation visibility.

Is this Fixable?

The short answer is yes. A faster site and a cleaner schema do matter, but mostly as a potential entry point. If a page loads too slowly or breaks outright, AI search engines time out and move on, and the page gets excluded before anyone even gets a chance to judge the content. That’s foundational table stakes, not strategy. The real fix is turning what your company already knows into what AI can actually find.

What would actually convince your buyers and build trust with the LLMs answering on their behalf? If you sat down with five customers, how would you turn their feedback into answers to the questions buyers haven’t asked yet? And once you have those answers, where across third-party sites do you disperse them, so that they become both a magnet for LLMs and a visibility trail PR can use as a genuine word-of-mouth strategy with media and referral sites?

If you’re interested in seeing how AI currently cites your company, and which competitors are getting cited instead, I’d welcome the chance to show you. Let’s talk.

For more on AI strategy and its business impact, visit scheinerinc.com/perspectives. To continue the conversation, you can reach me at mike@scheinerinc.com. As always, thank you for reading and/or listening.

Photo by Wolfgang Vrede on Unsplash