Is Your Marketing Answering the Wrong Question?

The Buyer Can Now Start Somewhere Else

A buyer looking for a solution used to have to do a fair amount of the assembly themselves. They might search for a category, visit several websites, ask colleagues, read an article, compare companies and gradually form a view of who belonged in the conversation.

AI can change the starting point.

A buyer can describe the problem in ordinary language and ask for help understanding it. They can ask what approaches exist, which companies might be relevant, what distinguishes one approach from another and what they should consider before making a decision. They can then challenge the answer and keep going.

This is no longer hypothetical behavior in B2B buying. Gartner surveyed 645 B2B buyers in late 2025 and found that they used an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase. Forty-five percent said they used generative AI, primarily to gather information about vendors and products. At the same time, 69% preferred to validate AI-generated insights with sales representatives. (Gartner)

That last number matters as much as the first.

AI is not replacing the rest of the buying process. Buyers are adding it to the process.

Forrester reached a similar conclusion in its 2026 research, describing generative AI as increasingly influential in how B2B buyers discover and evaluate options while noting that human networks remain important for validation and reducing risk. (Forrester Research, Inc)

So I am not interested in predicting the death of Google, declaring the salesperson obsolete or pretending buyers have suddenly handed every decision to a machine.

Something subtler, and potentially more important, is happening. The buyer can now ask for the market before deciding which companies in the market deserve attention.

That Changes What “Getting Found” Means

For years, digital marketing has been extraordinarily focused on helping businesses get discovered.

Rank higher. Reach more people. Increase traffic. Earn the click.

Those things still matter. But the click is no longer always the first meaningful interaction between the buyer and the information that shapes their decision.

OpenAI describes ChatGPT Search as allowing people to ask questions conversationally, receive current answers drawn from web sources and continue with follow-up questions while the system retains the context of the conversation. (OpenAI)

Think about the implication.

A buyer may begin forming an opinion about your category, your competitors and potentially your company before visiting anyone’s website.

The answer can come before the click.

We can already see evidence of that behavior in conventional search. Pew Research Center analyzed 68,879 Google searches in 2025 and found that users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when no AI summary appeared. That study was not specifically about B2B purchasing, so I would not use it to make a broader claim than it supports. But it does demonstrate that when information is synthesized directly in the search experience, behavior can change. (Pew Research Center)

That should get the attention of anyone responsible for growth.

Not because clicks are disappearing.

Because some of the evaluation that once required the click can now begin before it.

Most Marketing Wasn’t Built to See This

Here is where I think the industry has a blind spot.

Our dashboards are very good at telling us what happened when someone encountered us.

How many people saw the campaign? How many visited the website? Where did they come from? What did they click? Did they convert? Which keywords generated traffic? Which content created engagement?

Useful questions. Useful information.

But most marketing measurement was not designed to answer a different question:

• What happened when a buyer asked about the problem we solve and somebody else became the answer?

That interaction may never create an impression in your ad platform. It may never create a website session. It may never show up in your CRM. The buyer may simply encounter a different company first.

That is why one of the most interesting marketing problems emerging right now is not simply measuring where a company appears. It is understanding where it does not appear and why.

The distinction is important because this cannot be reduced to another visibility score.

Visibility has never been the business outcome.

A company can be highly visible and poorly understood. It can generate enormous reach and little response. It can rank well and still give a buyer no compelling reason to choose it.

Visibility only creates the possibility of something happening.

Visibility + Engagement = Opportunity.

That equation becomes more interesting, not less, in an AI-mediated buying environment.

If a recommendation introduces a company the buyer did not know, it creates visibility. If what the buyer learns causes them to investigate, compare, validate or initiate a conversation, it creates engagement.

Opportunity is what becomes possible because of both.

That is why I resist treating AI as another channel to bolt onto the marketing plan.

It raises a more fundamental question about what all of those channels are supposed to produce.