In this blog, we look at how AI has changed the B2B buyers’ journey and the most important next steps B2B marketers must take in response to those changes. 

What is changing about the B2B buyers’ journey—and why? 

Back in September last year we discussed the changing B2B buying journey, examining the adoption of AI search tools and changing buyer demographics. 

Now, less than a year later, we can see how quickly AI search tools have impacted marketing’s role in the B2B buying journey. 

First, let’s take a quick look even further back than last year… 

Before the internet, Marketing’s role in complex, high value B2B buying was primarily to influence awareness and consideration, leaving the research, evaluation and decision-making stages to the human sales teams. 

As internet adoption increased (and issues like speed and data were overcome), more of the buying journey came under Marketing’s purview, as B2B buyers were able, and more inclined to undertake more of their research independent of those sales teams. 

Over the past 12-18 months, AI search tools have accelerated this trend, enabling B2B buyers to: 

• Ask more, better, and deeper questions 

• Get answers exponentially faster and cheaper (and with less effort) 

• Create shortlists before they ever become a lead 

Which means Marketing has more work to do while Sales teams will get fewer, and better-informed, leads. 

The shift to demand capture 

We recently wrote about demand capture as a useful way of understanding how marketers need to react to this shift in B2B buyer behaviour. 

TLDR: the changing B2B buyers’ journey means a lead generation-first strategy might kill your brand.

So, what should B2B marketers do in response to this shift?  

The B2B Marketer’s AI search action plan in four steps 

AI search tools are evolving all the time, as are the tools which purport to leverage them, measure them, and, in some cases, “game them” in the same way that black hat SEO did back in the early 2000s. 

As this landscape shifts before it settles, here are four pragmatic steps you can take now to leverage AI search tools for demand capture. 

1. Understand how AI search tools provide answers to B2B buyers 

Marketers must understand how AI search tools are providing answers to buyers’ questions (not to mention their own). 

(Note we focus here on ChatGPT, but other engines work in a similar way.) 

If the tool has high confidence in the information that’s baked into its LLM (large language model), it will provide that answer without any other information. 

You can of course influence that but remember LLMs are only updated so often and only with so much information (they cannot hold all the information in the universe and certainly not what happened yesterday). 

But today’s versions of AI search tools are much smarter about recognising whether they can construct a useful answer and if not, they know to look for it elsewhere. 

So, for complex B2B buying questions, framed as detailed and specific prompts from a sophisticated user of AI search tools, the best answers will need information taken from outside their LLM. 

And quite often, it is just using information gathered from Google queries. The sorts of Google queries that a smart user of Google would make (just more of them and much, much faster). 

Given that AI search tools are using Google searches to generate answers for your buyers, you must provide (even more) expert, authoritative content to get you onto consideration lists. 

Which is precisely why good old fashioned SEO and content creation will continue to be the cornerstone of successful B2B demand capture. 

Your next steps to understand the buyers’ journey on AI search: 

• Use realistic prompts that simulate sophisticated, commercially motivated buyers 

• Use tools like Query Detector for ChatGPT to look inside the AI Engine’s black boxes 

• Take advantage of emerging tools like Bing Search Console’s AI Performance Dashboard, HubSpot AEO, and advancements in Google Search Console 

2. Measuring the B2B buyers’ AI search journey 

Measuring how AI search tools interact with your content is still somewhat in its infancy. There are tools that purport to do this—and new tools and improvements to existing tools are happening all the time. 

No doubt what we say here today will be outdated in a few months or possibly even weeks with the release of better measurement tools, but as of today one of the best ways to measure how AI search tools are crawling your site and using your content is through good old fashioned log file analysis. 

Log files, or webserver activity log files to be pedantic, are automatically generated text files that record every activity or request made to your web server—including requests from AI search tools. 

AI search tool activity is not currently captured by other commonly used website analytics tools, so this logfile data is invaluable in understanding the performance of your content in terms of AI search. 

Here’s the catch: 

If you want to understand how AI engines are using your content, you need your webserver log files and right now they’re probably being thrown away every day or every couple of days. 

So, B2B marketers interested in measuring the performance of their websites on AI tools must ensure their webserver log files are being archived so they have sufficient, relevant data to analyse. 

There are also already tools available to help you understand how your website is explored, read, and interpreted.  

We like OnCrawl, which we have recently used to analyse our own log files.  

And when we compared that data to data provided by Google Analytics on click throughs from ChatGPT, we discovered that there is something in the order of 50 or 100 times more usage of our website content from ChatGPT than is being recorded by GA. 

Given the AI engines retrieve a lot more information than they cite and they cite a lot of things that are never clicked on, if you are only measuring clicks, you are missing, and misunderstanding, most of the story. 

Your next steps for measuring the B2B buyers’ AI search: 

1. Archive your webserver activity log files 

2. Analyse those files 

3. Do not only rely on clicks 

4. Measure AI search in much the same way you measure long tail SEO but consider the AI search tools as your users 

3. Influence the B2B buyers’ AI search journey 

Some good news for B2B marketers who have long understood the value of long tail SEO content: that is precisely the content that AI search tools are using to construct answers to the prompts your prospects are using. 

And some bad news for B2B marketers hiding their best content behind lead gen forms: if the AI tools can’t access crucial information, for example pricing, from your website, but they can access it from your competitors, you won’t even make the shortlists the tools are creating. 

Key next steps for influencing the B2B buyers’ journey: 

• Focus on “old-fashioned” long-tail SEO (check out these top SEO tips for more help) 

• Prioritise substance over presentation (remember most users won’t ever get to this content and the AI search tools don’t care what colours or images surrounded the content they scraped) 

• Create or surface content that answers real buyers’ questions 

• Make your content available to AI engines (beware JS/CDN/etc. blockers 

• Consider opening the “sales wall” – as important as lead capture is, remember that AI tools will find answers SOMEWHERE, or exclude you from the answer altogether. 

• If you don’t have one already, build a “measure/plan/improve” cycle for content—and prioritise it 

4. Improve the B2B buyers’ journey on your website 

If you’re successful in the above, prospects will come to your site at some point. And if they’ve made it that far, the chances are they are impatient, ready to contact their shortlist, and prone to move that list quickly. 

If the onsite experience you offer is suboptimal, e.g. they can’t find a phone number, your form is laborious to fill out, the mobile experience is slow or awkward, they will move on even quicker than before. 

Key next steps in improving the B2B buyer’s journey: 

• Strive for excellence in conversion optimisation 

• Make it easy for the well-qualified buyer to speak to sales whenever and however they are ready 

• Have a phone number and answer it! 

• Be alert for AI bots taking over the “action” step 

Note: this last point is of particular interest, because very soon the AI engines will also fill out forms for users, potentially make phone calls and essentially take over the next step of the buying journey. And when they do, it may be that your current technical set up for forms, e.g. ReCAPTCHA, will be doing more harm than good! 

So, watch this space or subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll make sure you’re updated. 

And if you would like more support in understanding, measuring, influencing, or improving the B2B buyers’ journey for your prospects—get in touch with one of our digital marketing experts today.