The big wake-up call for many B2B Tech marketers comes when they first audit their brand visibility in LLM Overviews, grasping the seismic shift in consumer behaviour following the rise of AI platforms.

The answers returned to their prompts surprise even the most experienced marketer, more so after years of spending time and budget on SEO. Their first time doing so will likely return a mix of channels they expect to see, some they don’t, and some they’ve neglected entirely, or we’re completely unaware of.

The shock of the new norm

Unsurprisingly, a company’s owned website pages are the most likely to contribute to AI responses when a marketer asks an LLM questions about their brand. However, the exact pages referenced may differ from those predicted by Google Analytics, SemRush, and others. The reason is simple: AI determines a page’s authority using a different algorithm than its predecessors, often leading to surprising results when querying an LLM about your company.

This change in consumer behaviour isn’t a temporary ‘honeymoon period’ with LLMs; our customers’ searching habits have permanently changed. They’re now using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for answers, and, naturally, the answers they’re receiving are changing as well.

Don’t neglect the back-end

SEO is only a portion of what is needed to tell LLMs and AI Overviews about your offerings. These new channels speak their own language, so keywords & meta tags alone won’t cut it. 

You will likely need to overhaul aspects of your website’s backend, from its Robot.txt and LLM.txt protocols to implementing schema markups if you want to show up where your customers now spend their time looking for answers. 

Don’t worry. Positive’s done the hard yards and we’ll be releasing a cheat sheet in the coming weeks that addresses the basics, so stay tuned.

The ultimate AIO goal is to build credibility, source by source and over time to ‘flush out’ less favourable content, replaced with content which is on-message, current and paints your solutions in the correct light, all whilst ensuring that it’s peaking AI’s language. This involves a mix of experimentation over time with myriad prompts and discipline to focus only on those activities which ‘move the needle’.

As with all new processes, it can be really helpful to bring in external expertise such as the AIO Services of Positive; get in touch with us today if you’d like to find out more.