Which AI Tools Do B2B Buyers Use and What It Means for Your Visibility
A few months ago, researching a vendor meant a handful of Google searches, a few open tabs, and maybe a call to a friend at another company. That's not really how it works anymore.
Which AI tools do B2B buyers use during that research? Increasingly, more than one. 91% of B2B buyers now use AI at some point during the purchasing process, according to a 2026 survey of 770 buyers from LLM Listed. Even more telling, 90% of those buyers use AI before they ever contact a vendor. By the time your sales team gets a call, a lot of the evaluation already happened, and it happened somewhere you might not be watching.
We wanted to know what that looks like in practice, both across B2B buyers broadly and for our own clients specifically. Here's what we found, and what it means for how we think about SEO and content going forward.
Which AI Tools Do B2B Buyers Use, and Why It's Not Just One
Mostly, four: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, roughly in that order. And no single one dominates the way you might expect.
Among B2B buyers, Google AI Overviews leads at 27%, followed by ChatGPT at 23%, Claude at 15%, and Microsoft Copilot at 11%. Consumer usage concentrates much more heavily around Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, but B2B buyers spread out across a wider mix.
Part of that comes down to habit, not preference. As Customer Impact points out, which AI tool someone reaches for usually follows from what they already have open. Someone in Microsoft 365 all day opens Copilot. A team on Google Workspace uses Gemini. Someone who just wants a fast answer opens ChatGPT. Nobody is picking a "procurement AI." They're using the same assistant they use to draft an email or summarize a report, which is exactly why this shift happened so fast. No new software, just a new habit.
We're seeing the same pattern in our own numbers. Across our client base, Google AI Overview generates by far the most AI-referred traffic of the platforms we track, with ChatGPT, AI Mode, and Gemini trailing well behind. That lines up with the broader research: Google's AI layer is the one most B2B buyers run into whether they're looking for it or not, simply because it sits on top of a search they were already doing.
What This Means for AI Search Visibility in B2B
Buyers don't just use AI, they believe what it tells them, and that's where things get a little uncomfortable for a lot of brands.
97% of respondents said they trust the information AI platforms give them, and it's not a passive kind of trust. 85% said they've changed their mind about a purchase because of something an AI platform told them.
94% said they'd stop considering a company entirely if an AI platform surfaced something negative about it. Outdated pricing, a missing service line, an old complaint that's no longer true, none of that has to be fair or even accurate. If AI says it, a lot of buyers believe it and move on before you ever get a chance to set the record straight.
That changes what AI search visibility actually means for a B2B brand. Reviews, press coverage, and search rankings have always mattered. Now what AI platforms say about you belongs on that same list, sometimes with even more weight behind it.
Why Traditional Analytics Miss a Lot of Your AI-Driven Traffic
A lot of buyers never click through from the AI tool at all, which makes this easy to underestimate if you're only watching referral traffic.
56% of B2B buyers said they ask AI directly for a company's contact details or website link, then use that information on their own, typing the URL in directly or searching the brand name on Google instead of clicking a link inside the AI response. That visit shows up in your analytics as direct traffic or branded search. It doesn't show up as "came from ChatGPT," even though ChatGPT is exactly where the decision to visit you got made.
If you're judging AI's impact on your business by referral traffic alone, you're almost certainly underselling it. This is part of why we've been testing Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit with our clients. It's built to show where AI Overviews are showing up and which topics are triggering them, which gets us a layer of visibility standard analytics just can't see.
What Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Actually Means for B2B
Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is the practice of structuring your content so AI tools can understand it, trust it, and cite it when they generate an answer. Think of it as SEO's next chapter: same goal, different mechanics.
Brand mentions across the web correlate roughly three times more strongly with AI citation than backlinks do, according to an Ahrefs analysis of 75,000 brands cited in a Loganix report. That surprised us a little. AI platforms pull from a wider pool than your own website: trade publications, reviews, forums, LinkedIn, comparison sites. If those sources consistently describe your brand accurately, that appears to matter more than how many sites link to you.
The other piece is extractability, which is really just a technical word for clarity. AI tools pull short, direct answers out of well-structured content far more easily than they pull them out of vague marketing copy. That's the same idea behind answering questions clearly and early and building content around real gaps instead of the same generic topics everyone else covers. Writing clearly for humans and writing in a way AI tools can use end up being the same job.
It's not just a visibility play either. The same Loganix analysis found AI-referred search traffic converting at roughly 5.1 times the rate of traditional Google organic traffic. Buyers who arrive at your site after an AI tool already compared you to competitors tend to show up further along and more ready to act.
Building AI Brand Visibility for B2B Companies
None of this means starting over. It means paying attention to a few things that weren't on most B2B marketing checklists two years ago.
Your content needs to answer real questions specifically, not generically, since AI tools reward clarity over cleverness. Your presence outside your own website (reviews, industry mentions, third-party coverage) now carries real weight in whether AI tools recommend you at all. And you can't optimize for just one platform. With buyers spread across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, showing up in one doesn't mean you're showing up in all of them.
We've already been adjusting how we approach SEO and content with this in mind: writing for clarity first, strengthening pages that already perform instead of chasing volume, and watching where AI visibility shows up for our clients beyond just rankings and clicks.
If you want a clearer picture of how your brand shows up in AI-driven search, we're happy to take a look.
