As platforms such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot become part of the buying journey, AI visibility is becoming just as important as traditional SEO. If your business doesn't appear when potential customers ask AI tools for recommendations, or if your products are described inaccurately, you could be losing opportunities before anyone visits your website. In this guide, we'll explain what AI search visibility means, why it matters for B2B businesses, and how to carry out a practical AI visibility audit to understand where your brand stands.
Your potential customers are increasingly asking AI tools who they should speak to before they even open Google. That isn't a prediction for the future, it's already happening. According to analyst firm Forrester, 94% of B2B buyers now use AI during their purchasing research, and almost half begin evaluating suppliers through an AI assistant before they visit a company's website. In many cases, the shortlist has already been formed before someone lands on your homepage. For B2B businesses, particularly those operating in specialist, technical or niche sectors, this is something worth paying attention to. Not because traditional SEO no longer matters, it absolutely does, but because there's now another way buyers are discovering businesses, and most organisations aren't tracking it or thinking about it yet.
At Versantus, we've recently started carrying out AI visibility audits as part of our digital marketing work. The findings have been fascinating and, in some cases, quite surprising.
What AI visibility means for B2B
AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, your brand appears when someone asks an AI tool a question that's relevant to your business.
The big players are Google AI Overviews (the AI-generated summaries appearing at the top of many Google search results), ChatGPT with Browse (used by hundreds of millions of people every week), and Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Copilot), which also plays a significant role in AI-powered web search.
The proportion of B2B technology queries triggering AI-generated search results has increased from 36% to 82% in the space of just one year (Search Engine Journal, March 2026). This is a fundamental change in how buyers research businesses in your sector, not a gradual trend.
The stakes are high because of how B2B purchasing decisions work. Research consistently shows that around 70% of the buying journey is completed before a buyer contacts any supplier (6sense), while 95% of buyers select from a shortlist formed at the very beginning of their research. If your brand isn't part of that early AI-generated shortlist, you may never get the opportunity to make your case.
What we found when we ran an audit for a specialist B2B client
We recently completed an AI visibility audit for a UK-based specialist distributor: a business with strong domain expertise, solid search rankings for their core terms, and a loyal customer base. The audit tested 36 queries across Google AI Overviews, Bing AI, and ChatGPT, covering branded searches, product category queries, and common customer questions.
What we found illustrated both the opportunity and the gap.
Where they appeared well
Branded searches on Bing AI returned accurate, well-sourced results. Product queries linked to specific industry standards and certifications came through clearly. The brand's depth of technical knowledge, evident from their existing content, translated into solid AI citations where that content existed.
Where things went wrong
Product misclassification. AI tools repeatedly confused one of the brand's core product categories with a completely different product. The two share similar terminology but serve very different purposes. So buyers searching for exactly what the brand sells were being handed the wrong answer with no way of knowing.
The cause was the website itself. Nothing on the site explained the difference between the two products, so AI tools made their own assumptions and got the answer wrong.
Brand name vs acronym. The brand's full name and its commonly used abbreviation weren't being recognised as the same entity by AI tools. A search for the full name returned relevant results, while a search for the abbreviation, which customers and specifiers use regularly, returned very little of relevance.
Google AI Overviews not appearing. For searches using the brand's own name, Google AI Overviews weren't appearing at all. This represents a missed opportunity to establish an authoritative presence on branded searches where the business should naturally be highly visible.
Competitors with stronger content. Competitors had better structured product descriptions, clearer FAQ-style content and more structured data, all of which are signals AI tools use when deciding which content to surface.
Why B2B brands are particularly exposed
Consumer brands often benefit from a large digital footprint, with plenty of reviews, media coverage and third-party mentions. AI tools use these signals when deciding which brands to recommend.
For many specialist B2B businesses, the picture is very different. They typically have fewer independent mentions, fewer reviews, and content that's written for technical audiences rather than answering the questions potential customers are searching for. Research by Semrush and Fuel Online found that 62% of brands are effectively invisible to generative AI, despite investing in traditional SEO.
Another challenge is that AI platforms don't all work in the same way. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity draw on different sources and rank information differently, meaning a business that's highly visible on one platform may barely appear on another. Averi's analysis of 680 million AI citations found that of the domains cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity, only 11% appear in both, findings backed up by Whitehat SEO's study of 118,000 AI responses.
AI search results are also constantly changing. Between 40% and 60% of cited sources change from month to month as AI models evolve and competitors publish new content. AI visibility isn't something you improve once and forget about. Like SEO, it needs ongoing monitoring as search continues to evolve.
What works to improve AI visibility
The good news is that many of the things that improve AI visibility are the same things that support good SEO. There's no completely separate playbook, but there are a few areas that deserve extra attention.
Structured, clear content. AI tools favour content that's easy to understand, with direct answers to common questions, a logical page structure, and product descriptions that clearly explain what something is and what it isn't. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews place more emphasis on content structure, while ChatGPT tends to favour domain authority and readability.
Disambiguation. If your brand name has a common abbreviation, or your products share terminology with something unrelated, make those distinctions clear. Don't assume AI tools will work it out on their own.
Third-party mentions. AI models rely heavily on sources beyond your own website. Coverage in trade publications, industry directories, association websites and other trusted sources all helps build confidence in your brand.
Bing indexing. ChatGPT relies on the Bing Search API when retrieving information from the web. Many B2B businesses have focused their technical SEO almost entirely on Google, so it's worth making sure Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing's equivalent of Google Search Console) is set up correctly and there are no Bing-specific crawling issues.
E-E-A-T signals. Google uses a framework it calls E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) to judge whether a source is reliable. Around 96% of Google AI Overview citations come from sources with strong E-E-A-T signals, including author credibility, citation diversity, structured data and domain authority. These aren't new SEO principles, but they're becoming increasingly important as AI continues to shape how people search.
How to find out where your brand stands
The best place to start is with a simple manual audit.
Pick 20 to 30 search queries that reflect how your customers are likely to search, including branded searches, product category searches and common questions. Then test them across Google (for AI Overviews), Microsoft Copilot, and ChatGPT with Browse.
Look for:
- Does your brand appear at all?
- Is the information about your brand accurate?
- Are your products or services described correctly?
- Are competitors appearing where you would expect your brand to appear?
- Are there any factually incorrect or misleading answers?
The last point is more important than it might seem. If an AI tool confidently gives incorrect information about your products or services to someone who doesn't know any different, it can become a reputational issue as well as a visibility one.
From there, you can prioritise content improvements, identify gaps in third-party coverage, and monitor how your visibility changes over time.
The opportunity is now
Only 22% of marketers currently track AI visibility, and fewer than 26% plan to develop content specifically for AI citations, despite AI-referred visitors converting at five times the rate of Google organic traffic.
AI visibility is still a relatively new area, and most brands aren't paying much attention to it yet. That creates an opportunity for businesses that act early. The organisations investing now, while many competitors are still deciding whether AI search matters, will be in a stronger position as more buyers begin using AI to research suppliers.
Traditional SEO isn't going anywhere, but the way people discover businesses is changing quickly. The organisations that understand both SEO and AI visibility will be better placed to stay visible as search continues to evolve.
If you'd like to understand how your brand appears in AI search, we're now offering AI visibility audits as part of our digital marketing service. Get in touch with our team at versantus.co.uk/contact, or find out more about our digital marketing services at versantus.co.uk/services/digital-marketing.
Not sure where to start? Download our free AI Visibility Checklist. It's a practical guide that will help you assess how your business appears across AI search platforms and identify some of the quickest improvements you can make before investing in a full audit.
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