Many B2B marketers have seen online leads decline recently. A major reason is the shift from traditional Google marketing to visibility in AI tools such as ChatGPT. If you want to understand how to respond, first find out whether your name or brand already appears in AI. You can test this at different stages of the B2B buyer journey: awareness, comparison and buying.
If you are looking for new prospects, you need to be visible to people exploring a problem your product or service solves. This week Vogue (I thought I’d bring in a different source for once) wrote about AI visibility as a new measurement layer for brands. One interesting detail: many AI references come from earned media, meaning sources beyond a brand’s own website. The article is about fashion, but the lesson also applies to you as a B2B service provider: in the awareness stage, AI does not only look at what you say about yourself. It also looks at what others say about you. Vogue
Use these 10 questions to test whether prospects can find you in AI
Want to attract more prospects through AI? Test the questions below without using your brand name. Fill in your market, service and customer problem, then run the questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. You can also ask me to run an AI Competitor Scan, but that would be a rather blatant attempt to win you as a client.
| No. | Awareness question |
|---|---|
| 1 | Which providers help companies tackle [the problem you solve] more effectively? |
| 2 | What are good solutions for companies struggling with [the problem you solve]? |
| 3 | What approaches can help companies improve [the process your prospect wants to improve]? |
| 4 | Which specialists help B2B companies with [their challenge]? |
| 5 | What do companies usually do when [problem] keeps getting worse? |
| 6 | What trends are shaping [service category] for medium-sized companies? |
| 7 | What mistakes do companies often make with [process/problem]? |
| 8 | What types of agencies or partners can help with [problem]? |
| 9 | Which sources can I use to learn about [topic]? |
| 10 | Which companies or experts are often mentioned in connection with [service category]? |
Copy and paste the full answers, including links, so you can review: are you mentioned, which sources AI uses, and which providers it presents as relevant solutions. Run each question three times in an anonymous or new browser window, or use anonymous chat. Your prospect also starts searching without a history in your area of interest. If you are missing, you have a challenge in the awareness stage. The first improvement is usually clear problem-focused content, better case studies and external mentions that confirm what you do. Measure whether AI sees you as relevant to your prospects’ problem. Without that foundation, it is difficult to make the shortlist later. In my next article, I explain how to test visibility in the comparison stage.
Also read the questions for the comparison stage and the buying stage.
This translation was made by AI.