A marketing expert has issued his killer tips on how IT vendors and channel partners can ensure their services are recommended by AI answer engines.
ChatGPT and other AI tools have “changed how B2B IT buyers research”, a new report by marketing agency Visibility Wins has asserted.
It looks into how six of these tools – namely ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, Grok, and Google’s AI Mode – decide which UK and Irish vendors, distributors and IT services providers they recommend.
“AI tools like ChatGPT are having a massive impact on how IT buyers are discovering and evaluating vendors and service providers,” report author Adam Grant told IT Channel Oxygen.
“Therefore, I wanted to better understand how ChatGPT and other AI tools decide who to recommend, helping teams in the channel improve their visibility in AI tools and thus generate business this way.”
Visibility Wins’ research attempts to answer those questions with data from 25,862 citations across 1,000 commercial-intent prompts designed to mirror how real IT buyers research vendors.
Across six major AI models, vendor and provider websites account for 73.1% of all citations. Independent third-party sources, analysts, media, review aggregators, and comparison sites make up the remaining 26.9%.
“The first AEO [answer engine optimisation] investment is making your owned content answer the buyer’s questions, a model that would otherwise answer for someone else,” the report states.
AEO “is not SEO with new acronyms”, the report concludes.
“The cited surface is structured differently, the trust signals are weighted differently, and the rules vary by model in ways traditional search did not,” the report stated.
“The opportunity for early adopters is the same that existed in early SEO: cost of action is low, the signal is still legible, and the competitive set has not yet caught up.”
Grant’s golden nuggets
Asked about his killer tips on how vendors and IT providers can win when it comes to AEO, Grant said they should “make it very clear, publicly, what they do, who they help, and where they have proof”.
“The businesses most likely to be recommended are the ones that make their expertise easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to validate,” he told us.
“For example, if someone searches ‘best MSP for a growing law firm in London with 24/7 support and Microsoft expertise’ AI tools are looking for a provider that matches those constraints. The vendors publishing that level of detail via case studies, integration and partner pages, specialisation pages, industry pages, directories, and on LinkedIn, Reddit, or YouTube are the ones getting recommended.”
So, how are the rules of the game different from SEO?
Grant said the difference between the two shows up in two ways, namely how businesses get recommended, and how that recommendation impacts the business.
“SEO is one component of AEO,” he said of the former.
“When you prompt an LLM, it runs a ‘query fan-out’, generating several searches (usually via Google or Bing) and pulling from 5–100 sources to build its answer. If you’re not showing up in that fan-out, you won’t get recommended.
“SEO helps you rank high enough to be found in that fan-out. But being found doesn’t mean you will be recommended. LLMs build answers from multiple sources: directories, industry publications, analysts, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube etc to create its answer. Depending on what industry, the mix of what AI cites shifts. We’ve seen businesses with weak SEO still get recommended because they had strong third-party authority elsewhere. SEO is just one lever for AI visibility.”
The bigger difference lies in how those recommendations actually impact the business, Grant said, however.
“SEO’s value is discovery: you have a problem, you search, you land on a few websites and maybe convert on one or two. AI search changes that journey: Buyers now use LLMs to research, evaluate, and compare vendors against their specific needs, all inside the AI tool, before ever reaching a website. By the time they land on your site, they’re often ready to book a call because they clearly understand why you’re the best option,” he explained.
“Across every sector we work with, we’re seeing the same pattern: less traffic, fewer unqualified inbound leads, but an increase in high-quality leads. People are still buying; they just do more of the journey independently vs on your website and with your sales team. SEO drives discovery; AEO acts as a trusted research partner throughout the whole buying process. That’s why businesses need to actively manage what’s being said about them in these tools, regardless of how reliant they are on inbound search traffic.”
