When AI Leads the Pitch

Half of B2B software buyers now begin their purchasing journey by asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. Not Google. The LLMs are sharing opinions about your brand: what you do, how you do it, even why you do it. Most companies have no idea what they're saying.

According to G2, 87% of B2B software buyers say AI chatbots are changing how they research. When asked which sources they rely on to research software solutions, AI chat came out on top—ahead of vendor websites and software review sites.

This shift is fueling an emerging field of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). But most strategies still apply SEO thinking to a fundamentally different problem.

The first engagement with potential customers isn't on your website, through your content, or through your sales team. It's through an LLM synthesizing your brand story from fragments across the internet. Many companies don't even know they're being evaluated.
Most companies are still hyper focused on optimizing for Google's algorithm (e.g. backlinks, keyword density, page speed), while AI models care about something else entirely: coherent, auditable claims they can triangulate across sources.

When an AI synthesizes your brand story, those carefully optimized landing pages matter less than the coherence of your narrative everywhere else. The team at The Digital Bloom found that brand search volume, not backlinks, is the strongest predictor of AI citations. Why? Because models weight sources based on frequency of mention across diverse contexts, not domain authority. This fundamentally rewires which marketing investments actually drive visibility.

"In traditional search, you fight for position in a ranked list," says  Keller Maloney, co-founder of Unusual.ai, an AEO/GEO platform. "In AI-mediated discovery, you're trying to convince an intelligent evaluator by providing better evidence. The models behave more like human reviewers than search algorithms—they triangulate claims across sources, notice contradictions, and hedge when information is inconsistent."

So what actually drives those AI citations? When users mention a brand explicitly in an LLM query, earned media drives nearly half of all citations (48%). While AI isn't watching your Super Bowl spot or catching a glimpse of your billboard on the 101, it’s picking up the conversations your human audience might be having about them. It's synthesizing mentions from Reddit threads, review platforms like G2, editorial and independent media, and thought leadership content that establishes genuine authority. 

AI models extract and synthesize. They need unambiguous, auditable claims they can confidently cite. Not a greatest hits listicle of your brand's accomplishments. Not marketing copy optimized for conversion. Clear statements of who you're for, who you're not for, and what proof supports those claims.

Over the past few years, many companies have made a risky trade: starving brand investment to feed performance marketing tactics. Aggressive retargeting, tighter funnels, short-term ROI campaigns. All the infrastructure for reaping, none of the investment in sowing.

The brands adapting fastest are taking a long view and rethinking the role of content in form, function, and purpose. Pillar pages with crisp definitions. Comparison pages that state tradeoffs explicitly. Case studies with quantified outcomes. Cross-channel messaging consistency that builds a durable signal ecosystem. And stories: authentic narratives that attract human audiences, spark conversations, and generate the third-party mentions models synthesize into credibility. 

This isn't about manipulating algorithms. The work goes deeper than typical SEO tactics. It's about building signal consistency and coherency across every touchpoint where your brand appears.

This approach compounds over time. Each piece of quality content, each earned mention, each customer story reinforces your brand's presence in the training data and real-time sources AI systems pull from. While short-term performance metrics fluctuate, this builds “durable visibility” and grows your share of model.

AI-led discovery acts as an unforgiving mirror. Weak brands with strong performance marketing suddenly find themselves exposed. Strong brands with inconsistent narratives discover gaps they didn't know existed.

The models will tell your story however they understand it. The question is whether the story they're telling matches the one you think you're building. This has always been the work of brand building, creating a story that travels without you. But AI-led discovery raises the stakes. When a human misunderstands your brand, you might never know. When a major LLM does, your competitor gets the citation.