Your Next B2B Buyer Asks AI First

A finance director at a 300-person company needs new expense software. It has to work with the accounting system her team already uses, and it has to be live before the next quarter. A few years ago she would have searched Google, opened a dozen tabs and asked a peer or two. This time she opens ChatGPT and describes what she needs.

In under a minute she has three names, a line on each, and links to a couple of reviews. She books demos with two of them.

Somewhere there is a vendor that would have been a better fit. It has the right integration, happy customers and a strong sales team. None of that mattered, because it wasn’t on the list. There was no visit to its website, no form filled in and no lead for its team to chase. It lost the deal before the deal existed.

That is how a growing share of business buying now begins. The first conversation a buyer has about your category is often with an AI, and the AI decides who gets the next one.

Half of software buyers now start with AI

In March 2026, G2 surveyed 1,076 business decision makers across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. The results are worth sitting with (G2).

51% of software buyers now start their research in an AI chatbot more often than on Google. 71% use AI chatbots somewhere in their research, up from about 60% just seven months earlier. ChatGPT alone went from 47% of buyer usage to 62% in a year. And these are not casual users. Two in five use AI tools every day, and most spend six or more hours a week with them at work.

More importantly, AI is no longer just a research shortcut. It is shaping the shortlist.

Source: G2, 2026 AI Search Insight Report · View chart full size

AI chatbots now outrank review sites, analysts and vendor websites as the biggest influence on which companies make the cut. And the effect on the final decision is real. 69% of buyers said an AI chatbot led them to choose a different vendor than the one they had planned on. A third bought from a vendor they had never heard of before.

The shortlist is being written somewhere you can’t see

For a challenger, those numbers are an opening. A smaller company with the right answers in the right places can now reach buyers who would never have found it through search ads or analyst reports. For an established company, they are a warning. Years of brand building do not guarantee a place in the answer. The AI doesn’t care how long you have been in the market. It cares about what it can find and trust.

What it finds is often not your website. When a buyer asks for the best tool in a category, the AI pulls from review site profiles, “best of” lists, comparison and “alternatives” articles, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, YouTube walkthroughs and analyst pages. Buyers notice where the answer comes from. In G2’s survey, citations from review sites were the single biggest reason buyers trusted an AI answer, and 85% said they thought more highly of a vendor the AI cited.

The questions buyers ask matter too. G2 found that a third of buyers open with a category question, such as “what’s the best expense software for a mid-size company.” Nearly as many open with a competitor, such as “what are the alternatives to” a tool they already know. If you only show up when someone types your name, you are missing most of the conversations that decide who gets a demo.

AI gets things wrong, and buyers act on it anyway

64% of business buyers say they run into AI mistakes a few times a month or more. When the AI gets a brand wrong, buyers respond in different ways. Some ask a peer, some ask the AI why a vendor was left out, and some simply go with what the AI recommended or fall back on a familiar name (G2).

For a vendor, that is the uncomfortable part. An outdated review that says your product lacks a feature you shipped last year, a comparison post that lists the wrong pricing, or an AI that simply doesn’t know you integrate with the system the buyer uses can quietly take you out of the running. You will never hear about it, because the buyer never reached you.

None of this shows up in a CRM. There is no lead to score and no lost opportunity to review. Pipeline just gets a little thinner, and the reason is invisible.

Why this is different from search

It is tempting to treat all of this as SEO with a new name. It isn’t. In search, you could see your ranking, buy your way to the top of the page and measure every click. In an AI answer there is no page one. There is a short list of names and a sentence or two on each, assembled from sources you don’t control. Each assistant, whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Copilot, draws on different sources and reaches its own conclusions. And the answer to the same question can change from one day to the next.

Wharton professor Kartik Hosanagar has written about what decides whether an AI recommends a company in the first place. It comes down to whether its crawlers can reach your site, how you show up in what the model has learned, which search index it relies on, and the words on your pages (Creative Intelligence). Most marketing teams have never been set up to manage any of those things.

So the first job is to see clearly: which buyer questions you show up for, what each AI says about you, which sources it relies on, and where it gets you wrong. The second is to fix those sources, not just your own pages. The third is to test changes before you make them, because live changes take weeks to show and AI answers move around in the meantime.

How Bodhium Labs helps B2B companies win the AI shortlist

This is the work we do every day, through the Bodhium Labs AEO platform and a team that works alongside yours.

We find the questions that matter. We map the category, competitor and requirement questions your buyers actually ask AI, and track how often you appear in the answers compared with your competitors.

We track every major AI platform. That includes ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Grok, Meta AI and Google AI Mode. You see where you appear, how you are described and how that changes over time.

We show you where the answers get you wrong and why. Every mistake traces back to a source, whether that’s a review site profile, an old comparison post, a Reddit thread or a LinkedIn discussion, so you know exactly what to fix. We also give you regular insights across Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and other channels, and we monitor what is making your competitors win.

We tell you what to do first. Instead of a dashboard to interpret, you get a ranked list of opportunities, ordered by the impact each one is likely to have. You can also ask questions of your data directly and get answers in plain language.

We help you make the changes. That covers blogs and articles, comparison and product pages, content edits and site optimization, and the third-party content and placements that AI tools trust.

And we test before you publish. Bodhium Labs is the only company that can test content before it goes live and tell you whether it will work. You can put two drafts, or two whole content strategies, side by side and see which one AI answers favor before anything goes live. That helps you avoid costly mistakes and get to the best strategy first, so your team spends its time on the changes that win deals instead of waiting a quarter to find out.

The results show up where it counts. At Moradi Neufer, COO Ben Barry puts it simply: “Now we get two dozen calls a month instead of three” (bodhiumlabs.com/geo). Our team is research-backed and measured on one thing: results for the companies we work with.

Be on the list

Your next buyer has probably already asked an AI about your category. The only question is whether your name came back.

If you want to know what AI tells your buyers about you today, and what it would take to be on every shortlist that matters, talk to the Bodhium Labs team.