AI Is Rewriting the Rules of B2B Buying
Remember when the buyer’s journey followed a neat little path? A blog visit. A gated white paper. A nurture email. Then, finally, an MQL is ready for sales.
That playbook? It’s fading into irrelevance.
Today, B2B buyers aren’t just browsing—they’re co-piloting with AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are quietly revolutionizing the way research is conducted, vendors are discovered, and decisions are made. Instead of clicking through an array of websites, buyers now ask one question and get a synthesized shortlist within seconds.
AI is already influencing the earliest and most critical stages of vendor selection. According to G2’s 2024 data, over half of buyers made an AI-assisted purchase in the last 90 days. LinkedIn’s 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report shows 39% of professionals use AI for search today, with that number expected to climb to 53% in 2025.
So the real question is, has your GTM strategy evolved fast enough to stay visible when the funnel itself has gone dark?
Your Buyers Are Already Deciding Without You
The traditional top-of-funnel (TOFU) hasn’t disappeared. It’s just become different and more challenging to see.
Buyers are still researching. But they’re doing it in stealth mode. Instead of reading your blog or downloading your guide, they ask ChatGPT: “What are the top supply chain platforms that integrate with Salesforce?” or “Which IT asset management tools are easiest to roll out company-wide?”
What happens next is critical: AI scans the web, summarizes content, pulls in feature lists, customer reviews, and schema-tagged data, then returns a refined, confident answer.
This is the Invisible Funnel, and it’s now the default mode of vendor discovery. If your messaging isn’t crystal clear, structured, and aligned to real buyer questions, your brand gets skipped over by both humans and machines.
You’re not just missing clicks. You’re missing entire conversations.
Why Traditional TOFU Playbooks Are No Longer Enough
If your go-to-market strategy still relies on gated PDFs, keyword blogs, and nurture flows, you’re competing in a field that’s already half empty.
Buyers now make most of their evaluations before they ever visit your site. By the time they fill out a demo request, they’ve already narrowed their options based on AI-aggregated research.
What’s more, AI models don’t reward vague messaging. They highlight well-structured, semantically rich content that clearly maps to user intent.
This is where Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO) comes in. Unlike traditional SEO, LLMO involves structuring your content and data so that machines can parse, understand, and present it as a trustworthy result.
5 Ways to Modernize Your GTM Strategy for the AI Buyer
Lead With Clarity, Not Cleverness
Avoid abstract slogans. Use language that answers real buyer questions. Include FAQs, tables, product specs, and ROI metrics.
Forrester’s 2024 report highlights that 81% of B2B buyers express dissatisfaction with chosen providers, often due to unclear value propositions and unmet expectations. This highlights the importance of clearly communicating ROI and outcomes early in the buyer’s journey to establish trust and gain a competitive advantage. Last year demonstrated that the time to value in the B2B space is shrinking, and we are now in a mode to deliver a return on marketing investment as quickly as 90 days.
Optimize for Semantic Discovery
So, what does this mean for search and content strategists, as well as digital marketing agencies, in the B2B Space?
- Being strategic is the starting point.
- Structured data helps AI summarize and recommend to you earlier in the buyer’s process. Therefore, utilizing schema markup effectively for your services, reviews, leadership bios, and knowledge base content is crucial to enhance search engine visibility.
- Review the buyer intent closely, as well as the metrics and attribution, as accurately as possible to guide the communication and overall content approaches.
Case in Point: How We Turned Structured Data Into a Growth Engine
When one of our logistics software customers partnered with us to enhance their discoverability through structured data, the results were immediate and remarkable. By implementing the reviews and FAQs schema and continuously refining their structured content, we aligned perfectly with their buyers’ search experience.
The impact? A 4.5x increase in organic conversion rate from Google compared to their previous year target, and a 3x higher conversion rate than traffic from other search engines. They also saw a 35% lift in non-branded organic traffic and a 10% drop in bounce rate on specific product pages from users.
What made this possible was their commitment to treating structured data not as a technical afterthought, but as a core component of their GTM strategy. By keeping up with evolving schema standards and exposing rich, machine-readable content, we positioned our customer brand to be surfaced earlier—and more often—by search engines and AI tools alike.
As you can see, LLMs are making it easier and more concise for buyers to make a decision; therefore, your GTM strategy cannot avoid AIO and GEO practices for your website.
Combine AI Automation With Human Touchpoints
AI might bring buyers to you, but real people still build trust. Pair interactive demos, chatbots, and ROI tools with face-to-camera videos, customer testimonials, and personalized outreach.
Be Present Where Buyers Are Asking Questions
Your site alone isn’t enough. Post to Reddit threads, Quora answers, YouTube explainers, and industry forums—places where AI pulls its data. These touchpoints increase visibility both to humans and language models.
A 2024 Edison Research report revealed that 46% of B2B buyers cite podcasts and expert forums as primary sources in vendor discovery.
Align Internally Around the AI-Driven Journey
Marketing can’t do this alone. Sales, product, and customer success teams need to align on messaging, feedback loops, and enablement content tailored for AI-indexed environments.
According to Gartner, 83% of sales reps say they’re struggling to meet the expectations of AI-informed buyers. Training and shared data access are key.
What This Means for You
This shift isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening.
AI is quietly reshaping how trust is built, how vendors are discovered, and how decisions are made—often without a single click on your website. Your buyers rely on machines to vet, compare, and shortlist before your brand even knows they’re in-market.
If you’re still waiting for traffic spikes to signal interest, you may already be too late. If your funnel depends on gated PDFs and email nurture tracks, you might be missing your most qualified prospects. And if your GTM strategy was built for the 2018 buyer, it’s likely out of sync with how decisions are being made in 2025.
This isn’t just a marketing challenge—it’s a visibility challenge. And solving it starts with understanding how you’re showing up (or not) in the AI-powered buyer journey.
Be Discoverable—By Humans and Machines
AI isn’t just changing how buyers search—it’s changing who gets seen. If your GTM strategy isn’t optimized for both human attention and machine interpretation, you’re losing ground before the conversation even starts.
Your website, product pages, and customer stories—if they aren’t structured for AI tools to crawl, summarize, and recommend, they may never reach the shortlist, no matter how valuable your offer.
That’s where the GTM 2.0 Assessment comes in.
We’ll help you identify where your funnel is falling short, where AI might be overlooking your brand, and how to refine your strategy so it appears first, when it matters most.
Book your GTM 2.0 Assessment today and start building a go-to-market engine that performs for both worlds.