Welcome back to The Catalyst. This month, our SEO Lead and Digital Marketing Strategist, Lisa Stauber, breaks down one of the biggest shifts happening in B2B marketing today: the rise of AI-powered search.
A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on the developing AI search industry. The takeaway? No surprise: Buyers aren’t searching the way they used to.
As AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) increasingly become the entry point for buyers researching solutions, the question is: are you showing up where and how it matters?
As someone who works at the intersection of content, media, and performance marketing, I’m seeing a very real shift in how buyers search, how search engines and AI tools serve information, and how brands get discovered (or don’t).
SEO as we know it isn't dead. But it most certainly is evolving. And marketers have to be agile and adopt new strategies to remain visible.
Traditionally, search engine optimization was about ranking in search engines (e.g. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) to drive traffic to your website. But now, with AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bard, Claude, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), and the recent launch of Yahoo's answer engine, Scout, we’re seeing a shift toward Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), a strategy focused on showing up in AI-generated results. (Some refer to this approach as Generative Engine Optimization—or GEO—but for simplicity, I’ll use AEO throughout).
AEO works a bit differently than traditional SEO. It pattern matches in a much more sophisticated way. It’s better at understanding context and nuance around what people are actually searching for. That’s what makes it so powerful.
Answer engines are built on something called LLMs, or large language models. These are AI systems trained on massive amounts of text: everything from websites and databases to books and forums across the internet. The goal is to help the AI understand human language and respond in a way that makes sense contextually.
So when you ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini a question and it gives you an answer, that’s an LLM in action. It’s pattern matching and breaking the question down into individual parts called tokens, then matching them across multi-dimensional spaces for context, language understanding, and intent.
AEO is directly connected to how these models are trained. If your content is structured in a way that LLMs can understand and cite, you’re much more likely to show up in those AI-generated answers.
The goal of AEO is to show up in AI-generated answers. The user might never even click through to your site, but if your brand is visible and cited in the answer, that’s a huge win.
AEO is more about brand visibility and surfacing in high-intent, high-value conversations without relying solely on traditional traffic metrics. In 2026, organic clicks will continue to decline. So it's important for B2B marketing leaders to adopt a mindset that you're not competing for clicks; you're competing for visibility.
That said, AI referral traffic is increasing. In less than a year, AI referrals to websites increased more than threefold (SimilarWeb). More and more, people are using AI tools to make purchasing decisions, asking them for vendor comparisons, product recommendations, or even who to work with. That means your brand needs to be part of that ecosystem or you’re missing out on key buyer touchpoints.
Semrush also recently studied the impact of AI search on SEO traffic and found that AI search traffic has the potential to overtake traditional organic search traffic within the next two to four years. And Forrester reported that in the B2B sector, AI-generated traffic now represents between 2% and 6% of total organic traffic and is growing at a rate of more than 40% per month.
Since buyers don’t typically engage with sellers until they’re about two thirds of the way through their journey (6sense), being visible early in AI-generated answers is crucial to building your brand so you'll earn that high-intent referral traffic when they're ready to make a purchasing decision: "Compared with users who were sent to a website by Google, those sent by ChatGPT tend to spend more time on a site, view more pages and are more likely to complete a transaction" (WSJ).
AI is now shaping demand across the entire buyer journey, so it's critical your content is optimized. Let's look at a few steps you can take today.
I tell our clients that well-performing content comes down to clarity, structure, and usefulness. AI tools are looking for high-confidence answers they can pull from reliable, well-structured sources.
Avoid vague, buzzword-heavy content. Instead of burying important information in a wall of text, use structure like subheadings, bullet points, semantic HTML, and schema markup. That helps AI identify the relevant sections, extract meaning, and cite your content appropriately.
You also want to eliminate barriers. Gated content, messy code, or inaccessible formats (like text in images) all limit what AI can see. If it can’t crawl it, it won’t use it. Content that performs well includes:
If your brand creates helpful, factual, well-sourced material, you’re more likely to be cited.
Right now, attribution from AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude is still a bit of a black box. But there are still a few ways to get signals:
It’s early days, but these signals can help you understand whether your AI optimization efforts are working and where to double down.
One last thing: we'll be posting a more in-depth conversation I had on AEO that will be up on the PlatinumBlack website soon. Stay tuned!
