B2B buyers
and AI search.

G2's numbers moved fast. The share of software buyers who start in a chatbot more often than Google went from 29% in its 2025 report to 51% in March 2026, and 71% use a chatbot somewhere in their research. Two findings matter most if you sell to businesses: one in three bought from a vendor they'd never heard of before, and 41% use Deep Research tools for structured evaluations. A chatbot can introduce you, or leave you out, before anyone visits your site.

It's a survey of software buyers, mostly outside Australia, so treat it as a direction, not a local benchmark. The local signal points the same way: the National AI Centre's tracker found 44% of Australian SMEs had adopted AI by February 2026. Many of the businesses you sell to now have these tools open at work.

Buyers don't take the answer on trust, though. In TrustRadius research with 2,058 technology buyers, 72% had seen Google's AI Overviews, 84% of buyers in APAC, and 90% said they click through to the cited sources to fact-check. The AI answer gets you considered. Your own pages, and what others say about you, get you believed.

They don't all work the same way, and each gives a site owner something different to check. This is what the providers themselves say, checked on 2 November 2026.

Google says AI Mode works by breaking your question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries on your behalf, and its developer guide calls this query fan-out. Business questions fan out a long way, because the person asking has to justify the answer to other people.

Take a finance manager at a 60-person civil contractor in Penrith asking for 'payroll software that handles construction awards'. Behind it sit questions about award interpretation, whether it works with MYOB or Xero, cost per employee, setup time, and what happens to past pay records when you switch. A site with one product page covers none of them. A site with a clear page for each gives the AI, and the finance manager, something to quote.

I list those follow-ups before writing anything, using Fan-out Mapping. The list usually shows the same gap: plenty about features, nothing about cost, switching or who it doesn't suit.

Ask the tools what your buyers ask, at each stage, and write down what comes back. Use the same prompts each month, logged out or in a temporary chat, and compare the trend. One answer on one day proves very little.

Run it in more than one tool. A company named by Google's AI Mode can be missing from ChatGPT, and the fix is often different: one may need a page that answers the question, the other may simply be blocked from reading the site.

None of this is a trick. It's the work that makes a site useful to a buying group, done thoroughly. Google's guide is plain that you don't need new machine-readable files for its AI features, and that llms.txt is ignored by Google Search.

• Answer the follow-up questions on your own site: an AUD price range, setup time, integrations, support hours, where data is stored, and how hard it is to leave.
• Say who you're for in plain words: industry, company size, location. No tool can shortlist you for 'logistics firms in Western Australia' if no page says you work with them.
• Make the facts checkable. Buyers click the sources, so date your comparison pages, show where numbers come from, and keep old pages from contradicting new ones.
• Keep your description consistent everywhere. G2 notes that when ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude describe a vendor the same way, it builds confidence with buyers.
• Earn reviews where your buyers read them. TrustRadius found 77% of technology buyers read user reviews during a purchase.
• Let the crawlers in. Check robots.txt and any firewall or security plugin allow OAI-SearchBot and Bingbot as well as Googlebot.

More than you could a year ago. Search Console has a generative AI performance report for Google's AI features. Since February 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools has shown citations and grounding queries from Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, though not clicks. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, so those visits show in GA4, though since October 2026 many ChatGPT clicks have been reported arriving untagged and land in Direct.

Then ask people. Add 'An AI tool, like ChatGPT or Copilot' to the 'How did you hear about us?' question on your forms, and keep the answer in the CRM next to the deal. It's self-reported, but it's the only number that joins AI answers to pipeline. The CRM tracking page covers getting that field to stick.