Today’s buyers conduct independent research, compare options and form opinions before committing to a sale. Additionally, Google AI insights now appear in a significant number of searches, covering commercial and transactional intent queries in addition to informational queries.
The first interaction a buyer has with your brand may not be through your website, advertising, or campaign. It can be a synthesized response, aggregated from multiple sources, before a buyer clicks on a link.
In an AI-enabled search world, brands now need to be there early, credibly, and in the right context to influence the outcome. Brands aren’t just competing for attention, they’re competing to be part of the answer.
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Trust shifts to peer networks
Buyers place less importance on brand-focused messaging and more on peer validation, practitioner reviews, and community conversations.
LinkedIn Search shows that building trust is now one of the most critical drivers of B2B success. Brands that collaborate with credible voices achieve better results.
This change happens in environments that are difficult to control: Slack communities, LinkedIn conversations, peer networks, and niche industry groups. These spaces shape perception long before a buyer enters your marketing funnel.
Additionally, increased privacy standards and signal losses make it much more difficult to gain attention. Increasingly, buyers are moving away from irrelevant communications and low-value messages.
Create content to educate buyers
Content should be meaningful, focused on questions that resonate with the way buyers think. The goal is to create a significant presence at key decision-making moments in the purchasing journey.
Clear authorship, credible sourcing, and demonstrated expertise now determine whether your content is trusted and included in discovery environments.
Who represents a brand also changes. Subject matter experts (e.g. engineers, customer success managers, and practitioners) become content authors. Their voices are credible in their respective fields and will make the content travel further and harder.
Additionally, the information must be accessible. If it cannot be revealed, it cannot influence. Critical information cannot be hidden behind forms, embedded in PDFs, or structured in a way that prevents discovery.
Content architecture also needs to be rethought by dividing long-form content into modular, interconnected pieces that answer specific questions and structuring assertions so that AI systems can extract them.
Additionally, key information should be housed in HTML format rather than behind PDF files or record walls.
Rethinking the way to measure notoriety
Traditional metrics like impressions, traffic, and click-through rates indicate visibility, but they don’t capture influence. In an AI-shaped purchase journey, influence can grow even if clicks decrease.
Here are some new metrics to determine if your brand is influencing decisions.
- Sharing answers: How often your brand appears in AI-generated search experiences (tools based on Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit can help establish a benchmark).
- Presence on the restricted list: How often does your brand appear in suppliers’ initial consideration sets.
- Credible conversation: Mentions within trusted communities and networks of practitioners where buyers validate decisions.
- Trust signals: Reviews, customer proofs and expert recommendations that reduce perceived risk and help buyers make decisions.
Relevance is more important than reach
Old marketing strategies, including high-volume content production, gated assets, and broad paid distribution, don’t fail overnight, but they become less effective.
The new strategy is about winning the moments that matter: the responses, recommendations, and shortlists that form before a conversation begins. This happens by being helpful, credible, and present when and where it matters in the buying journey.
