Free White Paper
Your buyers are asking AI about your category. Are you in the answer?
A VP of Operations used to type your category into Google and click through five sites. Now she asks ChatGPT and gets one synthesized answer naming three vendors. If you're not one of them, you never get the click — and you never know it happened.
This paper explains what changed, why most B2B tech companies are invisible in AI search, and the six-step audit that tells you where you stand.
What's inside
Six sections, built around the questions B2B marketing leaders are actually asking about AI search.
How B2B buyers are using AI search
What the research phase looks like now that it runs through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews — and why your analytics can't see it.
Why most B2B tech companies are invisible
Four specific reasons companies don't get surfaced, and why every one of them is a copy problem rather than a technical one.
What AEO is — and isn't
Answer Engine Optimization is not a replacement for SEO, and it's not about gaming the systems. Here's the actual definition.
The five signals that get you cited
What AI tools consistently look for when deciding which vendors to name in an answer.
A six-step AEO audit
Run it yourself in about two hours with nothing but a browser. Includes the exact queries to test and what each result means.
The copy problem at the centre
Why the path to better AI visibility and the path to better conversion turn out to be the same path.
Excerpt · Section 5, Step 1
Ask the AI tools what they say about you
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. Ask the questions your buyers would ask when they're in early research mode, before they know vendor names:
- “What are the best [your category] solutions for [your target market]?”
- “How do [your target companies] typically solve [the problem you solve]?”
- “What should I look for when choosing a [your product or service type] vendor?”
Run each question in at least two tools, and run each one twice. The answers vary, and the variation is information. For every run, write down four things: whether you appeared, where in the list, how you were described, and which sources the tool cited.
That last column is the one most teams skip, and it's the most useful. The cited sources are the shortlist you're competing to join. They're rarely vendor homepages. They're review sites, industry publications, comparison articles, and the occasional unusually clear service page. Note who's there.
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