According to recent research, 94% of B2B buyers used AI in their most recent purchase journey. Chatbots are already cited as the top source influencing buyer shortlists, and 69% of buyers have switched vendors based on AI guidance during research.

It’s a lot. And however you feel about AI, it really matters: visibility in these search results can make or break your brand. Businesses that show up and stand out in AI search are increasingly the ones that make the final cut.

The issue isn’t just whether your name is in the search results. It’s what people see about you as they weigh up their options. AI could be saying things about your brand that don’t reflect your expertise or what you want to be known for – or are simply untrue.

If you don’t get a handle on it, your brand risks being misrepresented or ignored entirely.

Getting savvy with search

Marketers are responding with a range of tactics to improve how they show up in AI search results. Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the art of adapting brand content to suit how AI searches sources: forefronting clear, immediate answers that align with the prompt query and flagging authoritative evidence like third-party reviews or cited reports.

Adding schema to web pages acts as a “cheat sheet” for AI, explicitly telling it who you are, what your content means and how to cite you. It leans on Q&A and step-by-step formats to make content clear and easy to parse for relevancy. Other methods include restructuring pages in a way that tells the LLM what it wants to know immediately.

According to G2, the most common AEO approaches are content restructuring and increased review generation. Yet its report also notes: “few described a fully integrated, scalable strategy”.

This is brand new territory for a generation of marketers who have spent their careers honing traditional SEO tactics, and the results are patchy. And, let’s be honest, content created purely to suit LLMs is unlikely to delight the human consumers you actually want – and still need – to talk to.

A deeper diagnosis

We’ve established that things have changed fast – and we know most marketers aren’t ready. But the news gets worse. Standard AEO tactics don’t address the shift in how AI searches content to form its answers.

Most are just bolt-ons to SEO thinking, and focus on making content eligible to be surfaced. They don’t actually make it extractable and citable as a holistic and authoritative answer by the LLM. Fixes such as schema or answer-first copy are usually patches, applied piecemeal to existing pages rather than rebuilding the underlying infrastructure.

And while several tools are now being promoted as AEO solutions, most are diagnostic rather than corrective: they highlight the problem, show which competitors are being cited in your place, and track sentiment over time. They leave you with a lengthy to-do list, not a solution.

The real problem is that the knowledge that your brand needs AI to represent was never organised for that purpose.

It’s frustrating for marketers, because we know the information that could answer the audience’s questions does already exist. But it’s buried across pages and documents or locked in videos, designed for humans to skim rather than machines to read.

Supply and demand

So, how should you organise and present information in order for an AI system to represent your brand accurately and consistently, on your terms? That’s the question we’ve been grappling with lately at The Frameworks.

The first answer is to stop only plotting content to be stored in pages and channels, and begin structuring it around meaning, relationship and relevance. Each idea attached to your brand should exist as a clear, evidenced, cohesive unit, rather than as one paragraph competing for attention inside a longer piece written for a different purpose.

This addresses one side of the equation: the content supply. You also need to understand the demand. What are your audiences actually looking for? When people use tools like Claude, Perplexity or Gemini to search, their questions are far more detailed, specific and contextual than they might be in a traditional search engine. They’re looking for answers and recommendations that match their particular needs and situations, not just a list of generic solutions.

At The Frameworks, we’ve been exploring how to use AI to break down the roles, challenges and priorities of the people a brand wants to reach and to do research that digs beyond traditional rigid personas to shed light on the nuanced queries that their target audience is asking.

For brands, understanding these queries will be gold dust.

If your brand can combine the supply – consolidating all your existing knowledge to serve up concise and authoritative views of key topics – with demand (an in-depth understanding of what users actually want to know), you will be able to dynamically create content that meets them with an accurate, useful answer, whether inside the LLM or on your site itself.

In a world where two-thirds of B2B marketing and sales content sits unused, this is a powerful opportunity. All your unloved content can be put to work to actively contribute meaning and evidence around your brand story.

This restructured, repurposed content will make it easier for LLMs to read, cite and evidence information from your brand’s own perspective. And that will increase the likelihood that your brand is surfaced accurately – or at all – in AI-driven answers.

How to influence people

The stakes here are high – and rising. Only 7% of B2B buyers said AI did not influence their buying decision. If the LLM doesn’t see your brand as relevant, it will choose to surface competitors who more successfully signal their fit over you.

Worse still, if you don’t present a version of your brand that’s authoritative, evidenced and directly relevant to the audience query, the LLM will fill the gap with sources that are inconsistent, generic or just plain wrong. And that could hurt your reputation.

The shift in how B2B buyers discover brands has already happened.  If you don’t have an effective strategy to respond, you risk losing influence, credibility and, ultimately, deals. The brands that succeed will be those who adapt content to the new dynamics of search: freeing it from rigid web pages, grouping it more fluidly around meaning, aligning with specific audience queries.

If you want buyers to choose you, you have to be there when they need you – and ready with an answer that demonstrates what your business is capable of. We’ve been working on a set of solutions that will help you do just that, bringing our decades of experience of solving the problem of getting B2B brands closer to their customers. Stay tuned to find out more.