Your Buyers Found You on Google. Except They Didn't.
Here's a scenario playing out right now in B2B tech companies across North America.
The CEO asks the marketing team why pipeline is slow. Marketing points to blog traffic, email open rates, ad spend. Everyone's busy. Everyone's producing. And yet the phone isn't ringing the way it used to.
The problem isn't execution. It's that the buyer journey your marketing was built around no longer exists in the same form.
Where the Shortlist Gets Made Now
Buyers don't start their research on your website. They ask a question in Google and, increasingly, the search engine hands them an answer synthesized from across the internet, with a curated list of sources worth consulting.
Forrester's 2026 Buyers' Journey Survey found that twice as many buyers named generative AI or conversational search as their most meaningful research source, outranking vendor websites, product experts, and even sales reps.
94% of buyers now use AI tools during their buying process, and 83% of them define their purchase requirements before they ever speak with a vendor.
By the time your sales team gets a conversation, the buyer already has a point of view. They've consulted AI. They've read what it cited. They've formed a shortlist. Whether or not you made that list is being decided in moments you weren't present for.
What This Means for How You Invest in Marketing
I've worked with enough B2B tech companies to know what happens when this reality hasn't been built into the marketing strategy. Budgets keep flowing into channels that used to work. Content gets produced without clear intent. And leadership wonders why results aren't matching effort.
The shift to AI-mediated discovery changes two things that matter at the strategic level.
First, content quality now directly affects whether you're visible at all. Google AI Overviews reward structured, trustworthy, and authoritative content that directly answers buyer intent. Generic, volume-driven content doesn't make the cut. Buyers and AI alike are filtering for substance.
Second, traffic metrics are no longer a reliable proxy for marketing health. Over 58% of U.S. searches now end without any click to an external website when AI Overviews appear. If your marketing team is reporting organic traffic as a measure of visibility, they may be measuring the wrong thing entirely.
What Actually Works
This isn't a call to abandon what's working and rebuild from scratch. It's a call to be honest about what your strategy was built on, and whether those foundations still hold.
The companies gaining ground right now are doing a few things differently. They're creating content that earns citations, not just rankings. They're auditing how their brand appears in AI-generated search results, not just in page-one positions. And they're building their positioning and messaging around the specific questions buyers are asking at each stage of the journey, because that's precisely what AI search surfaces.
AI search traffic converts at 5.1 times the rate of traditional organic search. The buyers arriving from AI-cited sources are further along in their decision process. That's a meaningful commercial signal. The companies that capture that traffic are the ones whose content was built to be trusted, not just found.
The Strategic Question
If a prospective buyer typed your category problem into Google today, would your company appear in the synthesized answer at the top of the page? Would you be a cited source? Would your positioning, once a buyer found you, match what they already learned from AI before they arrived?
These are the questions a modern marketing strategy has to answer. They're also the questions I start with when working with a new client.
The buyer journey didn't disappear. It just moved somewhere most marketing strategies aren't looking yet.
If you're a B2B tech CEO or founder trying to understand whether your marketing is built for the way buyers research today, I'd be glad to talk. Let's connect.
