Artificial intelligence is no longer just assisting B2B buyers—it’s actively shaping their decisions, often before they visit a company’s website. This shift is transforming the buyer’s journey and redefining how brands need to position themselves online.
In a conversation with G2’s Industry Insights series, Jim Yu, Founder and Executive Chair of BrightEdge, emphasizes that SEO alone is no longer enough. As AI platforms like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity rise in prominence, marketers must ensure their brands are recognized, trusted, and endorsed by these engines.
Yu explains that today’s AI tools compress the B2B buyer journey into a single interaction. Instead of browsing multiple vendor sites, decision-makers rely on AI to generate curated shortlists, complete with comparisons, pros, cons, and even recommendations. In this new landscape, AI isn’t just interpreting queries — it’s forming opinions, offering guidance, and deciding which brands are visible.
BrightEdge’s data paints a stark picture: only 31% of AI-generated brand mentions are positive, and just 20% include direct endorsements. This inconsistency means that even if your brand appears in AI search results, how it is represented can vary drastically between platforms. In many cases, some brands are entirely absent—rendered invisible by AI. And in today’s fast-moving B2B environment, being invisible can be fatal.
The rise of generative search experiences is also reshaping the meaning of SEO. Google remains dominant with 92% market share, and BrightEdge reports a 49% increase in Google Search usage since the launch of AI Overviews in 2024. However, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Grok are rapidly gaining traction. Claude’s traffic surged 166%, while Grok saw a 266% spike in early 2025 alone.
Yu recommends B2B marketers adopt entity-based SEO strategies and optimize content for AI platforms, not just traditional search engines. Structured data, schema markup, and content that answers real, complex business questions are now essential for visibility. Brands must focus on being perceived as credible sources, especially as AI platforms increasingly cite the most authoritative content.
Marketers also need to rethink how they measure success. While traffic and rankings still matter, they’re no longer enough. As AI narrows options and delivers more conversion-ready buyers, real-time responsiveness, prompt effectiveness, and high-fidelity behavioral data will play a larger role in performance tracking.
Looking ahead, Yu predicts AI will evolve into a trusted advisor for B2B buyers—evaluating vendors, generating shortlists, and influencing purchasing decisions. He also anticipates a rise in AI-to-AI marketing, where procurement tools use AI agents to vet vendors. As a result, marketing will need to appeal not just to people, but also to machines.
To adapt, organizations are restructuring teams and creating “collaborative intelligence” roles to bridge the gap between human creativity and AI capabilities. These teams will focus on prompt design, content co-creation, data integrity, and compliance.
Ultimately, as AI becomes the first point of contact in the buyer’s journey, marketers must not only embrace AI — they must collaborate with it to ensure their brand remains visible, credible, and competitive in the evolving B2B landscape.
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News Source: G2.com
