Based on the 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report — a global study of nearly 4,000 buyers

There's a shift happening in how B2B buyers find and select vendors — and most companies have no idea it's occurring.

According to the 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, which surveyed nearly 4,000 buyers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, 94% of B2B buyers now use large language models (LLMs) during their buying process. They're using tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to compare vendors, analyze reviews, summarize options, and build shortlists.

The question is no longer whether your prospects are using AI to research vendors. They are. The question is whether your brand shows up when they do.

The Buying Journey Has Already Happened Before You Know About It

Here's the most important finding from the 6sense report, and the one that should fundamentally change how you think about brand visibility:

95% of the time, the winning vendor is already on the buyer's shortlist on Day One of their buying journey — before they ever contact a single vendor.

Let that sink in.

By the time a prospect reaches out to your sales team, they have already:

Researched their options independently
Compared vendors (increasingly using AI tools)
Built a shortlist ranked by preference
Identified their preferred vendor

And that pre-contact favorite wins the deal 80% of the time.

This isn't new behavior — Gartner has been reporting for years that buyers complete 70-80% of their journey before talking to a vendor. What is new is where that research is happening. It's no longer just Google and review sites. It's AI assistants.

How AI Is Changing the B2B Buying Journey

The 60/40 Shift

The 6sense report describes what they call the "70/30 Buying Journey" — buyers used to spend about 70% of their journey in independent research before engaging sellers. In 2025, that shifted to a 60/40 split.

Buyers are now contacting sellers roughly 6-7 weeks earlier than they did in 2023-2024.

But here's what most people miss: this doesn't mean buyers are less decided. They're contacting sellers earlier specifically to validate AI capabilities — not because they're uncertain about who they want to buy from. The preliminary consensus is still largely locked in before first contact.

AI Is Used to Synthesize, Not Discover

One of the most nuanced findings in the report is when buyers use LLMs in their journey. Most people assume AI is used at the beginning — to discover vendors in a category. The data shows something different.

LLM usage peaks in the middle of the buying journey — during the comparison and synthesis phase, not the discovery phase.

The most common use cases:

Comparing vendor offerings (creating comparison tables)
Summarizing large volumes of information
Analyzing sentiment in customer reviews
Drafting RFPs
Simulating total cost of ownership

This means buyers are coming to AI tools with a partial list of vendors already in mind, and using AI to compare and rank them — not to build the list from scratch.

The implication is significant: if your brand isn't already in the buyer's awareness when they start their AI-assisted comparison phase, you likely won't make the shortlist at all.

AI Hasn't Replaced Human Vendor Interaction — Yet

Despite 94% of buyers using LLMs, the report notes something surprising: buyer interactions with the winning vendor are essentially unchanged. Buyers still average 16 interactions per person with the vendor they ultimately purchase from.

Why? Because for purchases averaging $200,000-$300,000, buyers aren't willing to trust AI completely. They use it to narrow and compare, but they still validate through direct conversations, demos, and trials.

This creates a two-stage reality for B2B brands:

AI determines who makes the shortlist — if you're not visible in AI responses, you don't get in the game
Human relationships determine who wins — once you're on the shortlist, the quality of your sales conversations and content still matters enormously

The New Rules of B2B Brand Visibility

Rule 1: Be in the AI conversation before buyers start comparing

Since buyers use AI most heavily during the comparison phase — not the discovery phase — your brand needs to already be on their radar when they open ChatGPT.

This means:

Being mentioned in high-authority content that AI models learn from
Having strong citation patterns across trusted publications
Being discussed positively in forums, review sites, and industry communities

If the first time a buyer encounters your brand is through an AI comparison, you're already behind.

Rule 2: AI visibility and Google rankings are not the same thing

This is the part that catches most companies off guard.

You can rank #1 on Google for your target keywords and still be completely invisible on ChatGPT and Perplexity when a buyer asks for vendor recommendations in your category.

The 6sense report confirms that 94% of buyers are using LLMs — but LLM recommendations are driven by entirely different signals than Google rankings. They're based on:

The volume and quality of mentions across trusted sources
Entity recognition (does AI understand who you are and what you do?)
Citation patterns in authoritative content
The specificity of your positioning in a category

A company with 10,000 backlinks and a Domain Authority of 70 can score 0 on AI visibility if none of those signals translate into AI-relevant authority.

Rule 3: Who you're positioned against matters

The 6sense report shows that 80% of buyers in technology and software use AI at least as much as search engines when researching vendors.

This means your positioning needs to be optimized not just for human interpretation, but for how AI models categorize and compare vendors.

If you sell project management software, the question isn't just "how do you rank vs. competitors on Google?" — it's "when someone asks ChatGPT to compare project management tools for enterprise teams, does your name appear?"

Getting specific about your category, use case, and target customer makes it far more likely that AI systems will include you in relevant recommendations.

Rule 4: Your brand reputation online shapes what AI says about you

AI models learn from the internet. Every review on G2, every article that mentions your brand, every forum discussion where your product comes up — these feed into what AI systems say when someone asks about your category.

This has a profound implication: your brand's AI visibility is a lagging indicator of your overall digital reputation. If your customers aren't talking about you online, if reviewers aren't citing you, if journalists aren't mentioning you in roundups — AI won't know to recommend you.

Companies that have been investing in content marketing, PR, and customer success for years have a structural advantage in AI search that pure SEO-focused companies don't.

What the Data Means for SEO and Marketing Agencies

If you manage marketing or SEO for clients, the 6sense findings create both an urgent challenge and a significant opportunity.

The challenge

Your clients are likely invisible on AI search — and they don't know it.

Most of the metrics you report on — organic traffic, keyword rankings, domain authority — say nothing about AI visibility. A client can be winning on every traditional SEO metric and be losing deals because their prospects are using ChatGPT to build shortlists and they're not on them.

The 6sense report makes clear that buyers make their shortlist decisions during independent research, largely before your client's sales team ever gets involved. If AI isn't including your client in those early recommendations, no amount of outbound sales effort will fully compensate.

The opportunity

Most agencies aren't tracking this yet.

Being the agency that can walk into a client meeting and say "here's your AI visibility score, here's who AI is recommending instead of you, and here's our plan to fix it" is a significant competitive differentiator.

It answers a question clients are increasingly asking — "do we show up on ChatGPT?" — with real data and a clear action plan.

The Three Metrics That Matter Now

Based on the 6sense findings and what we're seeing at Mainroot, the metrics B2B brands should be tracking have expanded beyond traditional SEO:

1. AI Visibility Score

What percentage of relevant buyer queries on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude include your brand in the response? And at what position?

A brand with a visibility score of 70/100 appears in roughly 70% of queries in their category. A brand with a score of 10/100 is essentially invisible to AI-assisted buyers.

Of all the brands mentioned in AI responses for your category, what percentage of mentions belong to you versus competitors?

If your competitors collectively capture 85% of AI mentions in your category and you capture 5%, you're losing most deals before they start — regardless of how good your product is.

3. Citation Source Quality

Which websites and publications is AI citing to support mentions of your brand? Are those sources authoritative? Are they relevant to your buyers?

A brand mentioned primarily in low-authority blogs will score lower in AI visibility than one cited in Zapier roundups, industry publications, and high-authority review sites.

Why "Good SEO" Is No Longer Enough

The 6sense report confirms what many marketers have suspected: the buying journey has fundamentally changed, and the signals that influence brand selection have multiplied.

Traditional SEO optimizes for a specific moment: the keyword search. You want to appear when someone searches a specific phrase. But the 6sense data shows that buyers increasingly bypass keyword searches entirely, going directly to AI tools to get synthesized answers.

This doesn't mean SEO is irrelevant. It means SEO is necessary but no longer sufficient.

The brands that will win in the next 3-5 years are those that:

Rank well on traditional search (still important for discovery and verification)
Appear prominently in AI-generated recommendations
Have strong review profiles on platforms AI systems trust
Are mentioned frequently in authoritative content AI learns from
Have clear entity data that helps AI systems understand who they are

The 6sense report notes that even as buyers use AI more, they still visit vendor websites — 68% visit brand websites just as often or more than before an AI interaction. AI doesn't replace your website; it filters who reaches it. Only the brands AI recommends get that traffic.

How to Improve Your Brand's AI Visibility

Based on the patterns we've observed, these are the highest-impact actions for improving how AI systems represent your brand:

1. Audit your current AI visibility

Before you can improve, you need to know where you stand. Run your domain through an AI visibility tool to understand your current score across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Look at which queries mention you, which don't, and what position you typically appear in.

2. Identify the gaps

What queries in your category are returning results that don't include you? What are your top competitors being cited for that you're not? These gaps represent your highest-value content opportunities.

3. Build citation authority

AI systems cite sources. The more high-authority sources that mention your brand in relevant contexts, the more likely AI is to include you in recommendations. This means:

Contributing to industry publications and roundups
Getting reviewed on platforms like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot
Being quoted in relevant news and research
Participating in communities where your buyers and industry peers discuss solutions

4. Clarify your entity data

AI systems need to understand who you are before they can recommend you. Ensure your brand has:

A complete, accurate Crunchbase profile
Consistent information across all directories and databases
Clear schema markup on your website
A Wikipedia or Wikidata presence if your brand is large enough to merit one

5. Optimize content for AI parsing

AI models prefer content that is structured, specific, and authoritative. This means:

Writing content that directly answers the questions buyers ask AI
Using clear, specific language about what you do and who you serve
Including data, research, and specific claims that AI can cite
Avoiding vague positioning that AI systems can't confidently categorize

6. Track your competitors' AI presence

Knowing that your competitor appears in 90% of category queries while you appear in 30% is actionable intelligence. Which sources are citing them? What content do they have that you don't? What are they being praised for in AI responses?

The Window Is Open — But It Won't Stay Open

Here's the strategic reality: most companies haven't started optimizing for AI visibility yet.

The 6sense report shows that AI is already deeply embedded in the buying journey — 94% of buyers use it — but most brands are still operating as if Google rankings are the only visibility metric that matters.

This creates a rare window of opportunity.

In the early days of SEO, companies that moved first built advantages that lasted years. Domain authority, backlink profiles, and content libraries compound over time. The companies that started in 2005 had structural advantages over those who started in 2015.

AI visibility is at a similar inflection point. The brands building AI authority now — by generating citations, creating AI-readable content, and establishing clear entity profiles — will have structural advantages over those who wait.

The 6sense data makes the stakes clear: 95% of buying decisions are effectively made before the first vendor conversation. If AI isn't including your brand in the research phase that precedes that conversation, you're not competing for that deal.

The question is whether your brand will be on the shortlist when buyers open ChatGPT next week.

Check Your AI Visibility Score

Mainroot tracks your brand's visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude — showing you your score, your competitors' scores, and the specific queries where you're winning or losing.

Your first audit is free.

Check your score at mainroot.io →

Data in this article is sourced from the 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, a global study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers conducted across North America, EMEA, and APAC. Additional statistics referenced from Semrush's AI Tools and the Modern Buyer Journey study (December 2025, n=1,030 US shoppers) and Digital Commerce 360's analysis of B2B vendor discovery patterns.