Something fundamental has changed in how B2B buyers find vendors, and most marketers haven’t noticed yet.
Last week, I watched a procurement director at a £50M manufacturing firm shortlist three software vendors in under ten minutes. She didn’t visit a single website. She didn’t read a case study. She typed a prompt into Perplexity, got her answer, and moved on.
This isn’t an edge case anymore. It’s becoming the norm.
A recent piece from LinkedIn’s Marketing Blog puts hard data behind what many of us have been sensing: brand reputation has become a primary input for AI-mediated discovery. The implications for B2B marketers are profound.
The Old Funnel Is Dead
We spent years perfecting the awareness-to-conversion journey. Attract visitors with SEO, nurture them with content, capture them with forms, hand them to sales.
That journey assumed buyers would visit your website.
Increasingly, they don’t need to. AI assistants synthesise market landscapes, compare vendors, and generate shortlists without a single click-through. The buyer gets what they need from the AI’s response. Your carefully optimised landing page never enters the picture.
This is zero-click research at scale, and it changes everything about how we think about visibility.
What AI Actually Looks For
When ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends a vendor, it’s not running a keyword match. It’s attempting to identify authority and consensus across the open web.
That means it’s reading LinkedIn posts from your executives. It’s scanning Reddit threads where your customers complain or praise you. It’s checking whether your messaging stays consistent across your website, your social presence, and third-party review sites.
Fragmented messaging doesn’t just confuse human buyers anymore. It makes you invisible to the machines that are increasingly mediating their decisions.
From SEO to What Some Are Calling GEO
The LinkedIn piece introduces a useful frame: Generative Engine Optimisation. Where SEO asked “how do we rank?”, GEO asks “how do we become the source the AI cites?”
The tactics shift accordingly. Lead with answers rather than burying them below the fold. Structure content so machines can parse it cleanly. And perhaps most importantly, anticipate the follow-up questions a buyer—or the AI serving them—might ask next.
The Human Paradox
Here’s what I find genuinely interesting about this shift: succeeding with AI discovery requires becoming more human, not less.
AI models weight information from credible voices. That means your subject matter experts carry real SEO value now. Their LinkedIn posts, their podcast appearances, their contributions to industry discussions—all of it feeds the training data that shapes how AI perceives your brand.
Generic corporate content gets averaged into the background noise. Distinctive human voices stand out.
What This Means Practically
If you haven’t done this recently, open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type the prompts your buyers would actually use. “Best [your category] for [your market].” “How does [your company] compare to [competitor]?”
What comes back might surprise you. For some brands, the AI’s description bears little resemblance to their actual positioning. For others, they simply don’t appear at all.
From there, the work becomes clearer: ensure your value proposition is consistent everywhere the AI might encounter it. Get your experts visible on the platforms AI models actually learn from. Structure your content for machine readability without sacrificing the human voice that makes it credible.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Your brand is no longer just what you say it is. It’s what the AI thinks it is.
And right now, most B2B brands have no idea what that is.
The fix isn’t complicated: audit your AI visibility, align your messaging, and get your experts visible where it matters. The brands that do this now will own the shortlists. The ones that wait will wonder why their pipeline dried up.
Nicholas Kokkinos is a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Expert and Founder of Enso Digital, a London-based LinkedIn consultancy for UK B2B brands.
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