How B2B buyers research suppliers now
By the time a B2B buyer drops you an email or fills in your contact form, the decision to purchase is most likely already made. They’ve curated a shortlist of two or three suppliers, reviewed them, and formed an opinion on each. At this point, you’re either very likely to be able to close the deal, or not on the list at all. The interesting thing is that until this stage, you had very little to do with this buyer directly.
This process is not new, but the way that buyers research and shortlist their suppliers is, including how much of it happens before they even click through to your website.
Opinions formed before the need arises
Within technical sectors, buyers are forming opinions on brands without overtly searching for them. From reading trade press publications, to asking for recommendations from peers in WhatsApp groups or other forums, to scrolling past a comment on a LinkedIn post, they’ve probably had hundreds of touchpoints with your brand before they even come to directly researching you.
The issue here is that none of these appear in analytics, or if it does, it’s almost impossible to attribute. For example, a procurement manager may read a thought leadership feature penned by your technical director in June, and then reach out in December when planning budgets for the next year.
But while it can be difficult to say a particular piece of content, social media post, or piece of coverage was the direct catalyst for a sale, it’s clear that without a dedicated comms strategy, you wouldn’t be in front of buyers at all.
How AI has changed the research process
In traditional search, a prospect might type a keyword or phrase into a search engine which will then point them to a range of sites that they can look at to form their own opinion on a brand and what it offers.
For AI, whether that’s someone asking the question within a chat platform or a search engine’s in-built AI tool, instead of pointing them in the right direction, the tools synthesise the information and provide a ready-made answer instead, meaning that it’s much less likely a buyer will click directly through to your owned content.
And the data backs this up. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found that 69.5% of UK Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026 – higher than any of the other five countries in the study, including the US. Plus, the real numbers are probably higher, because this data excludes any search made within the Google app. The Reuters Institute also reported organic search traffic to more than 2,500 publisher websites down by 33% worldwide over the course of a year.
Add Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT to the mix and a buyer can build a well-researched shortlist without landing on a single supplier website.
This means one thing for B2B brands: being searchable is not the same as being visible.
You can rank on page one of Google and still be invisible in the AI platforms. But how can a business become both?
Why earned media is suddenly very important
When an LLM synthesises an answer, it acts as an investigative journalist, drawing on many sources where your brand has been mentioned – trade coverage, expert commentary, interviews, and mentions in industry reports. Your own website is just one source among a vast amount of others, and in many ways is the least credible – it’s the one with a clear agenda.
While owned content is still crucial to AI visibility, it’s the easier part. Any business can have a website, and it’s (relatively) easy to draft compelling content and publish it there. But not every business has a strategic earned media strategy and can secure coverage in trusted, credible publications and media outlets.
Credibility and trust are the essential parts here. In the same way a human buyer trusts a journalist quoting your MD in an article more than a blog post you drafted saying the same thing, LLMs put weight on authoritative earned media sources rather than your own content.
Therefore to achieve AI visibility, PR and content need to work hand-in-hand – supported by a foundation of good SEO – to deliver joined up, clear communications so that both humans and machines understand who your brand is, what it offers, and if it’s trustworthy.
Where to start
Run a simple test. Ask your three most recent clients or customers how they first discovered you, and how they researched you before making initial contact. The answers may surprise you.
Secondly, run a few of your buyers’ frequently asked questions through two or three different AI tools – ideally with memory and location features turned off to help avoid bias – and see if you’re mentioned at all. If not, look into which of your competitors are and start building a gap analysis.
Want to know if your brand is visible? Get in touch.