B2B AI search: 51% of buyers research there, 96% of brands aren't

By Stephan Charles | Last fact-checked: 2026-05-29

BrandCited is an AI brand visibility platform that monitors how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, You.com, and Brave Search cite your brand inside their prose answers. BrandCited scores AI visibility from 0 to 100 across 8 engines and shows every citation gap with a ranked fix list.

More than half of B2B software buyers now start vendor research in an AI chatbot, not Google, according to G2's Answer Economy report, a March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers and decision-makers. The share jumped from 29% in April 2025 to 51% in March 2026, in under twelve months. Yet 96% of B2B brands score zero when buyers run early-stage discovery queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, according to the 2026 2X AI Visibility Index. Four out of ten B2B tech marketers who established AI visibility reported a 5 to 10 percent inbound pipeline increase, per a May 27, 2026 survey by O'Dwyer PR. BrandCited monitors AI citations across 8 engines and shows exactly where your brand goes missing.

Run a free BrandCited scan to see your citation rate across 8 engines at brandcited.ai.

What changed in how B2B buyers find software vendors?#

B2B software buyers moved their research to AI chatbots in twelve months. The G2 March 2026 survey of 1,076 buyers found 51% now start vendor research in an AI chatbot, surpassing Google as the primary starting point for the first time. In April 2025, only 29% of buyers made this choice.

Sixty-nine percent of those buyers chose a different vendor than they planned based on AI chatbot guidance. One in three purchased from a company they had never heard of before. Seventy-one percent of B2B software buyers now rely on AI chatbots for software research, up from 60% seven months ago.

The platform footprint driving this shift is large. On May 19, 2026, Google confirmed at I/O that AI Mode in Search surpassed 1 billion monthly active users and that Gemini 3.5 Flash became the default model globally. AI Overviews now reach 2.5 billion users monthly. ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion prompts per day and holds an 80.49% AI chatbot market share, according to First Page Sage's May 2026 market share data. Perplexity now serves over 100 million monthly active users.

The AI search channel is not a future trend. The majority of B2B buyers use it for vendor discovery today.

Why are 96% of B2B brands invisible in AI search?#

The 2026 2X AI Visibility Index found that 96% of B2B brands generate zero AI search responses when buyers query their product categories. Only 4.3% of companies maintain a healthy AI discovery funnel where the brand appears in early-stage buyer queries. The remaining 95.7% appear only in queries where the buyer already knows the company name.

This is not an SEO ranking problem. A brand can hold page-one Google rankings and score zero on AI visibility because AI engines weight different signals. Structured entity data, named-author content, FAQ schema, and content freshness drive citation rates. Most B2B brands have spent their optimization budget on keyword rankings, not the structural signals AI engines use to decide what to cite.

Princeton research cited by Search Engine Land shows that fewer than 10% of sources cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot rank in the Google top 10 for the same query. Top Google rankings do not transfer to AI citations.

Only 34% of B2B marketers report having a defined AI visibility strategy and being highly prepared to influence generative AI engines, despite 93% saying AI search visibility is critically important. The gap between intent and execution is where competitors gain share.

Run a free BrandCited scan at brandcited.ai to see your citation rate across 8 engines before making any changes.

What does AI visibility do to inbound pipeline?#

The pipeline impact of AI visibility is measurable. A May 27, 2026 survey by O'Dwyer PR of 150 B2B tech marketing professionals found that four out of ten reported a 5 to 10 percent inbound pipeline increase after establishing AI visibility. Almost one in five reported an increase greater than 10 percent.

The referral traffic data from ChatGPT's May 7, 2026 brand links update shows why. On May 7, ChatGPT began embedding clickable brand homepage links inside answers at roughly five times the prior rate. Similarweb's analysis tracked a 157.7% week-over-week increase in ChatGPT referral traffic and a 354.7% jump in homepage referrals. The homepage share of ChatGPT referrals jumped from 26-32% to around 60% in a single week. Brands ChatGPT cites now receive traffic at the front door, not a buried product page.

Brands cited in Google AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks than non-cited brands on the same results page, according to Discovered Labs' May 2026 analysis.

The early-stage discovery gap has a structural consequence. The 2X index found that buyers who receive a shortlist of three vendors from an AI engine have made 70% of their purchasing decision before speaking to a sales team. A brand absent from that shortlist cannot recover through later-stage retargeting. AI-generated traffic is currently 2 to 6 percent of B2B organic traffic and growing at 40 percent month-over-month.

Which AI platforms do B2B buyers use for vendor research?#

B2B buyers distribute their AI research across multiple platforms, not just ChatGPT. ChatGPT commands 80.49% AI chatbot market share by sessions. Perplexity handles approximately 50 million weekly queries and runs live web retrieval on every answer, meaning content published today can appear in Perplexity citations within 7 to 21 days. Google AI Mode, now with 1 billion monthly users, integrates directly into the Google Search interface every buyer already uses.

Each engine cites sources with different logic. Perplexity runs web retrieval and weights named-author bylines as a citation signal. Articles without a named, visible author byline face exclusion from Perplexity's citation candidate pool. Google AI Mode uses retrieval-augmented generation against Google's Search index, so pages ranking on Google gain citation candidacy but do not automatically earn citations. ChatGPT in its base model draws from training data with update cycles of six to eighteen months.

BrandCited tracks citation rates across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, You.com, and Brave. Monitoring a single engine misses where individual buyers research and where competitors build citation share.

How does BrandCited audit B2B AI visibility?#

BrandCited's audit engine runs 1,000+ queries per brand across 8 AI platforms and scores every citation gap by impact. The AI Discovery Score category measures citation rates in queries where the buyer does not name a specific vendor. This is the score that correlates with early-stage pipeline, and a score below 40 here means the brand is absent from the shortlisting stage.

The audit surfaces three categories of gaps: entity gaps (AI engines do not recognize the brand as a defined entity in its category), content structure gaps (content lacks FAQ schema, named-author signals, or answer-first passage structure), and freshness gaps (pages not updated quarterly lose citation priority on retrieval-based engines). Each gap carries a ranked fix with estimated impact. Run the audit free at brandcited.ai.

What should B2B brands do right now?#

1. 1Run a baseline AI visibility scan. See your current citation rate across 8 engines at brandcited.ai before changing anything. The baseline makes the business case internally and identifies which engines to address first.
2. 2Add FAQ schema to your top 5 pages by traffic. FAQ schema gives AI engines a machine-readable Q&A layer they can extract without parsing unstructured prose. Use the Schema.org FAQPage specification. 20 minutes per page with a template. BrandCited's audit data shows 78% of onboarded brands had no FAQ schema on pages with FAQ content.
3. 3Add a named author byline to every content page. Perplexity weights named-author byline prominence as a direct citation signal. A name in metadata alone does not satisfy this. The name and a LinkedIn URL must be visible on the page.
4. 4Update your top pages quarterly. Pages not updated quarterly are 3 times more likely to lose citations on retrieval-based engines. A publication date that reads 2024 signals staleness to AI engines that weight content freshness.
5. 5Create an llms.txt file at your domain root. An llms.txt file tells AI crawlers what your brand does, which pages to prioritize, and what context to use when referencing you. Retrieval-based engines like Perplexity and You.com weight this signal. 30 minutes to write.
6. 6

AI search updates from the last 24 hours#

• ChatGPT service disruption: OpenAI services faced widespread issues on May 29, 2026, with users reporting problems across ChatGPT, the API, and login. Brands monitoring AI citations will see data gaps for OpenAI endpoints today. (Business Upturn)
• Google May 2026 core update: Google's second core update of 2026 formalized AI-first search ranking. Top-10 Google rankers now account for 38% of AI Overview citations, down from 76% in mid-2025. (Search Engine Journal)
• Perplexity Deep Research upgrade: Perplexity upgraded Deep Research to run on Claude Opus 4.6 for Pro and Max subscribers, improving quality for complex multi-step queries. (Perplexity Changelog)
• Google Preferred Source feature: Google is testing a feature allowing users to select websites publishing fresh content, which may appear with a Preferred badge in AI-generated answers. Users click links with the Preferred badge at twice the rate of untagged links. (Discovered Labs)
• AI visibility as CMO priority: A May 2026 survey of 150 B2B marketers found that 69% now rank AI visibility as a top CMO or CEO priority for 2026, up from under 30% at the start of 2025. (Forrester B2B Summit)

Run a free AI visibility audit on your brand at brandcited.ai. See your score across 8 AI platforms in 30 seconds, with every issue ranked by impact.

FAQ#

Why did B2B buyers shift from Google to AI chatbots for vendor research?

B2B software buyers shifted to AI chatbots because chatbots return a synthesized shortlist, not a list of links. A buyer asking which project management tool fits a 50-person engineering team gets a direct answer with named vendors and context, without visiting ten websites. G2's March 2026 survey of 1,076 buyers found that 53% consider AI chatbot research more productive than traditional search. The shift from 29% to 51% buyer adoption in twelve months signals structural change, not a temporary preference.

Does ranking on Google protect a brand from being invisible in AI search?

Google rankings do not transfer to AI visibility. Princeton research cited by Search Engine Land shows fewer than 10% of sources cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot rank in the Google top 10 for the same query. AI engines weight entity recognition, structured schema data, named-author signals, and content freshness, not keyword ranking position. A brand that holds page-one Google rankings and lacks FAQ schema, entity markup, and a named-author byline can score zero on AI visibility.

What is the fastest way to improve B2B AI search visibility?

Adding FAQ schema to existing content pages is the fastest high-impact fix. FAQ schema gives AI engines a machine-readable Q&A layer they can extract without parsing unstructured prose, and it affects retrieval-based engines like Perplexity and Google AI Mode within 7 to 21 days of publication. BrandCited's audit data from 500 onboarded brands shows 78% had no FAQ schema on pages with FAQ content in the body. One afternoon of implementation covers a site's top five pages.

How do I measure whether AI visibility is affecting my pipeline?

Track two metrics: AI referral sessions in GA4 by filtering traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, and gemini.google.com, and AI-influenced opportunities by adding AI chatbot as an option when asking inbound leads how they found you. BrandCited's dashboard shows citation rate trends per engine over time, which correlates with referral session movement. A May 2026 O'Dwyer PR survey found that brands tracking AI visibility as a pipeline metric reported 5 to 10 percent pipeline increases within six months.

How many AI engines should a B2B brand monitor?

A B2B brand should monitor at least the five highest-volume engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Copilot. These five account for the majority of B2B AI search queries. BrandCited monitors 8 engines total, adding Grok, You.com, and Brave, which together capture a growing share of technical and enterprise buyer research. Missing one engine creates blind spots that competitors fill.