Your buyers found you before you found them

"If a big insurer raves about you, word reaches the next few insurers on your list before you do."

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An investor said that to me a few weeks ago, when I was asking where things go wrong after a raise. It's stayed with me because it describes how most B2B buying works now. By the time a buyer gets in touch, they've usually made up half their mind already, based on things they've heard and read in places you'll never see.

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After a raise is also when the new acronyms start arriving. SEO, GEO, AEO, each with its own agency and its own line in the budget. I understand the temptation to buy one of each so the board can see you've got it covered.

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I'd treat it as one job: making sure that wherever your buyer looks, they find you, and they find proof.

How buyers find you now

The journey we see over and over in B2B goes something like this. A buyer hears your name from a peer, or sees you named in an AI answer. They check your LinkedIn for signs you know your subject. Then they Google you by name with a shortlist already forming, and your website closes a decision that started somewhere you'll never see.

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Each step relies on visibility you built months earlier. And because most of it happens out of sight, your dashboard only sees the last step and hands the website all the credit. (More on that next week, because it causes real trouble in board meetings.)

What's changed, and what still holds

AI tools now answer the "what is X" and "how does Y work" questions themselves, without sending anyone to your site. If your traffic was built on explainer content, you've probably felt it. What still gets cited is content that's specific, opinionated, recent and clearly written by a person.

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AI tools also put a lot of weight on brand mentions on other people's sites. Beka, our Organic Strategist, has been digging into this, and one experiment she found built a brand from scratch in a low-competition niche. It took around 16 external mentions to get it into the top 10 of AI answers. A crowded market will need more, but 16 is a number you can put on a whiteboard.

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Google still does most of the heavy lifting, and the people asking ChatGPT are mostly the same people still Googling. The technical basics still count: a fast, well-structured site, with the important information in the top third of each page, where both people and machines will find it.

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And social is where buyers check whether you know what you're talking about. A founder with a clear point of view, who replies to the comments personally, does a lot of the trust-building before a sales call is ever booked.

One plan for every place they look

What I like about treating it as one job is how much of the work overlaps. A guest slot on a podcast is a mention for the AI tools, a reason for people to search your name on Google and a clip for LinkedIn. A case study published on a partner's site does all of that and gives sales something to send.

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So brief your team on one list:

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• A plain description of what you do, in the words a buyer would actually type, on your homepage and in your website footer
• A target for external mentions this quarter: guest podcasts, partner blogs, event write-ups, press quotes, industry round-ups
• Customer proof with real numbers, published somewhere other than your own site
• A weekly point of view from the founder on LinkedIn

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The division of labour matters. The founder owns the point of view and the conversations it starts, and that part can't be handed over. The team owns the production: interviewing the founder, drafting, scheduling, and chasing every one of those mentions.

The one thing to do this week

Ask your team to spend 30 minutes on a visibility check and bring you the results on one page:

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• Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the question your best customer would ask before buying. Note who gets named (make sure to say, ‘act like a stranger’ otherwise it will use the knowledge you’ve built up)
• Google the same question, then Google your company name and see what comes up
• Count the external mentions you've had in the last 90 days
• Look at who comments on the founder's posts, and whether any of them are buyers

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The gap will usually jump out. If a competitor is named in the AI answers and you aren't, start with mentions. If people struggle to find you by name, start with the website.

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Drop me a line and tell me whether you showed up in the AI answers, and who did instead. I'll tell you honestly where I'd start, including when the answer is that your team can fix it without us.

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PS. Beka runs this exact check for our clients before we touch a single channel, and it shapes everything that follows. That's the Scale Up model: a fractional CMO setting the direction and a senior team delivering it, under one roof. Declared interest, obviously. If we're not the right fit, I'll point you to someone who is.‍