What The AI Says · B2B and professional services
When a buyer asks AI who to shortlist, is your firm in the answer?
The quiet change in B2B: the shortlist is being drafted in a chat window before you know the deal exists. Buyers ask an assistant to compare options, and firms the AI does not mention never hear about the deals they lost.
Transcript · what a customer sees
Best options for outsourced payroll for a 20-person company?
Three providers come up consistently for that size: Fernwhistle, NorthPoint Payroll and Clearstack HR. Fernwhistle is frequently cited for transparent per-employee pricing...
Names invented for the example. The pattern is real: fit the question, miss the answer, and the customer never knew you existed.
Measured, not predicted
The numbers for b2b and professional services
of B2B software buyers bought from a vendor they had never heard of before an AI suggested it.
now start vendor research with AI chatbots more often than with Google, and 71% use AI somewhere in the evaluation.
chose a different vendor than they originally planned because of AI guidance. 85% view a vendor more favourably once AI cites it.
Where the answers come from
What the engines read before they name anyone
When an engine builds a shortlist, it reads sources it trusts and cites them. For B2B that usually means:
- Review platforms: buyers rank a review-site citation as the single most trust-building part of an AI answer.
- Comparison and alternatives pages, where engines lift their pros-and-cons language from.
- Your own site, if it answers real buyer questions in plain language instead of slogans.
- Practitioner communities: Reddit, industry forums, and activity on X, which Grok reads directly.
Our scan shows which sources the engines actually cite for your category, and the monthly work gets you present in them.
Asked and answered
Common questions
- Our buyers are professionals. Do they really use AI for this?
- 51% of B2B software buyers now start research with AI more often than Google, and 71% use it somewhere in the evaluation. 80% say it made their purchase decision faster, which means shortlists close earlier than they used to.
- We grow on referrals. Why would this matter?
- An AI citation behaves like a referral at scale: a named recommendation with a reason attached, delivered at the moment of need. 33% of buyers purchased from a firm they had never heard of before an AI named it. That is referral reach your partner network cannot match.
- What does the work look like for a B2B firm?
- The same three questions as any business, tuned to your category: can the engines read you (structure, labels, a machine-readable layer), do trusted sources mention you (review platforms, comparison pages, communities), and do you answer the questions buyers actually ask. We do the work and report it monthly in plain words.
- Can you guarantee we get recommended?
- No. AI answers change and nobody controls them. We sell verifiable work and honest measurement: what the engines say about you today, what we changed, and what they say next month.
Sixty seconds to see where you stand
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