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A marketing strategy for AI-led discovery plans for buyers who build their shortlist inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or a Google AI Overview before they ever reach your website. It keeps the existing plan. It moves a bounded slice of budget toward being cited in those answers, and it reports success as visibility and pipeline rather than traffic alone.
Quick answer: AI-led discovery means buyers form a shortlist from AI-generated answers, often without clicking through to any site. A strategy for it does two jobs. It earns accurate mentions in those answers, funded by spend that is not earning its place. And it gives the board a metric it can follow, such as share of AI voice, tied to enquiries.
The reason this reaches board level is timing. In the 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, the winning vendor was already on the buyer's Day One shortlist 95% of the time, up from 85% a year earlier (self-reported survey of nearly 4,000 buyers). If AI answers shape that first list, the decision is mostly made before your sales team hears about it.
Why your buyers already use ChatGPT before your website
AI-led discovery is the part of the buying process where an AI engine answers the buyer's question directly instead of returning a list of links. An AI Overview is Google's version of that answer, shown above the usual results.
Your buyers are already there. Forrester found that 89% of B2B buyers had adopted generative AI, naming it one of their top sources of self-guided information in every phase of buying (2024 Buyers' Journey Survey).
Before and after, for the same buyer
Take an operations director looking for a new supplier.
- Before: they search Google, open six or seven sites, read case studies and fill in two contact forms.
- After: they ask ChatGPT which suppliers suit a business their size, ask a follow-up about pricing and get a summary of three names. They visit one website, to check the answer.
Fewer visits and fewer form fills. The same buying decision, made earlier and somewhere you can't see.
That is zero-click search: a session where the buyer gets an answer without visiting any website. Pew Research Center found that Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared (900 US adults, March 2025).
So the hard part is not that buyers use AI. The harder problem is that your marketing plan still measures a stage of the process that is shrinking. What changes in the plan is where you try to be present, and what you count as proof that it is working.
The budget question your board will ask
The board will ask where the money comes from and how it will know the spend is working.
So where does the money come from? Prioritisation, not new spend. In our marketing strategy work, that means separating the opportunities that connect to commercial goals from the work that can wait. Many budgets have a line in the second group.
The figures below are hypothetical, for a business spending £10,000 a month across paid search and SEO.
Reallocation is usually the easier case to make. It asks the board for a decision about priorities, not a bigger number.
The first, bounded step can be an audit. Our Search & AI Visibility audit starts from £3,000 + VAT, with ongoing support priced separately.
Nobody can credibly promise that ChatGPT, Google or any AI system will recommend your business. We don't. A proposal that guarantees inclusion is a proposal the board should question.
If you need help building the case, our board-level marketing strategy support starts with exactly this conversation.
How to measure whether it's working
Share of AI voice is the proportion of tracked prompts or AI answers in which your brand is mentioned or cited. It is the closest thing AI search has to a ranking, and it is the metric a non-marketer can follow month to month.
AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are the practitioner names for the work that improves it.
Zero-click search changes how you read your reports. Organic traffic can fall while your visibility rises, because buyers read the answer and skip the click. Tell the board this before the first report, not after.
Clicks and rankings on their own say little. A metric is only worth reporting if it connects to the commercial outcome the business cares about.
Our AI search visibility services measure AI referral traffic alongside rankings, impressions, clicks, enquiries and conversions, so the board report shows both the old picture and the new one.
What a 90-day plan looks like
A 90-day plan turns the measurement framework into a decision the board can review. Our Search & AI Visibility work follows six stages: Understand, Audit, Prioritise, Improve, Measure, Adapt.
- Weeks 1 to 2: Understand. Agree the buyer questions that matter, the competitors to track and the commercial goal the work serves.
- Weeks 3 to 5: Audit and prioritise. Record a baseline share of AI voice. Find where answers describe you wrongly or leave you out, and rank the fixes by commercial value.
- Weeks 6 to 10: Improve. Fix the pages and the third-party profiles AI engines draw on. Write clear answers to the questions buyers actually ask.
- Weeks 11 to 13: Measure and adapt. Report the trend against the baseline. Keep what is moving, and change the plan where results stall.
The output at day 90 is a clear view of where you stand, and a better-informed decision about the next quarter's budget.
If your team has the plan but not the capacity, we work as an extension of in-house marketing teams, not a replacement for them. When you're ready, let's have a conversation about a board-ready plan for AI-led discovery.
FAQ
How is AI search different from normal SEO?
SEO aims to rank a page in a list of links. AI search aims to have your business named or cited inside a generated answer, which the buyer may read without clicking. Much of the groundwork overlaps, but success is measured by mentions and citations, not position alone.
Does this replace our existing marketing plan?
No. It changes two parts of the plan you already have: what you prioritise and what you report. Channels and agreed goals stay in place, and the quarterly review decides whether anything else should move.
How long before we see AI-citation results?
Plan on a quarter before you judge the trend. The first weeks set a baseline, and fixes take time to be picked up by AI engines. Nobody can guarantee when, or whether, a specific engine will cite you.
