The emergence of AI tools is fundamentally changing how B2B buyers research—and the impact reaches beyond buzzy names like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Gone are the days when the simple layout of search results resembled a leaf of the Yellow Pages. The SERP (Search Engine Result Page) of 2026 is a dynamic, interactive kaleidoscope of multi-modal results, including AI-generated answers, videos, recipe cards, social links, shopping cards, and more.
This evolution is making Gartner’s 2024 prediction about declines in traditional search traffic seem increasingly realistic. But that doesn’t mean fewer people are using Google Search or foregoing it for LLMs. ChatGPT, Claude, and others combined only make up ~3% of the search traffic, but Google’s AI Overviews (where Google essentially answers the search with a long snippet) have cut down organic clicks and traffic significantly.
As these search trends continue to evolve—on Google’s properties and other platforms— B2B brands seeking to stay on top of the market also need to expand their content and web strategies to include what is unique about AI.
Here are 7 steps your company can take to strengthen search and AI visibility.
1. Double Down on SEO
First, let’s clear up the misunderstanding that AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are going to completely overtake Google Search. On top of Google’s continued dominance of the search market, the reality is that most AI tools use real-time web crawling to generate responses.
LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude not only scrape Google and Bing Search Results to identify websites to crawl, but also, when unsure about their answer, will “Google” the query behind the scenes and summarize the results. Google Search is one of the biggest—if not the primary—source of information AI models use.
If you’ve been writing expert content for your customers and optimizing it for Google—double down! Your keyword rankings and organic traffic will help your overall AI visibility.
Why Google clicks are down
If you've noticed fewer clicks from Google Search, you're not alone. But is it because more people are using ChatGPT? Not really. The main source of this is Google's AI Overviews that appear at the top of almost every search. These overviews try to answer the question, which can mean fewer clicks to your website.
2. Clean Up & Create Consistent Citations
Rather than making search smaller, AI technology has only expanded its reach. One way to understand this shift is to think of traditional Google Search as Planet Earth and AI as the Solar System. Where Google’s old algorithm used to look primarily at your website when building a profile of your “entity”, new algorithms now look at the whole system.
AI platforms in particular rely on many more sources to understand your company by aggregating data from 3rd party sources.
Citations and company listings or profiles where your company is mentioned include traditional directories like Yelp, BBB, Chamber of Commerce, or Capterra, but there are many, many more—often specific to your industry. If your information is inconsistent or missing key details across these sources, AI models will either return inaccurate results, hallucinate your details, or omit you entirely.
Whether you’re a B2B SaaS or selling products online, one of the first steps is to find where your company is listed (and where it should be listed, but isn’t) and build out profiles to include the information and keywords you want to be known for.
3. Make the Most of Short-Form Content
When we use AI search to find information, we interact with it differently from traditional search methods. AI is largely dialogue-driven, meaning buyers ask specific questions like “What is the best exterior paint for cold coastal areas?” rather than typing short keywords.
Even after the first prompt, users are likely to continue the conversation by asking more and more specific, longer questions to find the answers they seek. These specific questions are called longtail keywords, and they have the potential to bring valuable, targeted traffic to your site.
Using short-form content to directly answer longtail keywords creates an opportunity to appear in AI overviews and to be included in LLM responses.
For example, consider integrating video into your resource library using a short blog that introduces and summarizes the video. As discussed earlier, Google serves multi-modal results, so your content could appear in the AI Overview, video results, knowledge panel, or general SERP.
4. Adopt “Answer First” Content Optimizations
To capture search results for Google AI Overviews and LLMs, your content must be structured correctly. Adding summaries to the beginning of your content can be an effective tool because AI models have a limited “context window.” They prioritize the first few paragraphs of a page to generate their summary.
In the body of your content, use these specific buyer questions as your subheadings and provide a clear, definitive answer in the very next sentence. If your answer is buried at the bottom of the section, the AI will likely cite a competitor who was more concise.
FAQs, paired with FAQ schema markup, can also improve visibility because you’re providing straightforward answers to specific questions (longtail keywords). Avoid repetitive, basic FAQs that are just an SEO play—instead, add value with FAQs that are genuinely helpful.
5. Build Topical Authority
Building topical authority is essential to building your brand online because it pays dividends across all types of search. Both Google and AI models are more likely to reference and recommend companies that show deep expertise and direct experience in their space.
Demonstrating your expertise is an important way to show search engines and LLMs who you are, establish your brand, and develop your entity.
Instead of publishing scattered blog posts, build comprehensive content clusters around your core topics. This signals to AI models that your site is a go-to authority, not just a surface-level result.
The companies that get cited in AI answers tend to be the ones that own a topic, not just mention it. The same has been true for SEO for many years. It’s not enough to simply spin up a bunch of random content target keywords or phrases. It takes depth and expertise to get mentioned.
6. Use Technical SEO Best Practices for AI
To date, we see strong similarities between how AI tools find and crawl websites and how Google and other search engines gather data. If you’ve optimized your website from a technical standpoint for SEO, you’re likely already using best practices for AI tools.
This includes broad, foundational technical strengths such as correctly using schema markup, fixing broken links, ensuring your website’s internal linking is strong, and writing strong meta descriptions and titles. All of these best practices apply to both SEO and AI visibility.
7. Avoid AI “Slop” — Write Original Content
The web is flooded with generic AI content. If your blog sounds like a general summary of everything else on the internet, an AI engine will summarize you without ever mentioning your name.
And if you’re trying to get better SEO keyword rankings, writing slop is a quick way to get your content de-indexed. Don’t outsource every step to an LLM. Instead, invest the time and effort into writing on topics you understand and know.
Bonus: View Search as an Evolution, Not a Demise
If you’re hearing the doom and gloom of zero-click searches and AI replacing everything, take a deep breath. The strategies here are really just an evolution of what you’ve likely been doing for years: building a strong, credible brand.
By following these steps, you’re ensuring that as the technology changes, your expertise remains easy for both AI tools and human buyers to find, understand, and trust.
