Your sales team needs marketing support more than ever

There’s no shortage of information on how AI is influencing sales teams.

The last piece I wrote was partly a reflection on recent conversations about how small businesses can best power up their sales strategy with AI.

If salespeople are using AI — effectively or otherwise — is it much of a stretch to say buyers are doing the same?

Semrush’s 2026 research into B2B buying found that AI has helped 97% of buyers discover new vendors, shaped the vendor shortlist for 92%, and influenced the final decision for 83%. Separately, the same research found 69% of buyers use AI daily, and 95% at least weekly. (Source: Semrush — How AI tools shape the B2B buying process, July 2026)

This research will certainly ask questions of those businesses who view marketing as an expense, and those who use it mainly for lead generation.

Several 2026 studies — including Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse report — have found that roughly 84% of what AI cites comes from outside a brand’s own website, not from Semrush’s research specifically, but from independent studies on where AI models actually source their answers. This suggests marketing’s job must shift from generating leads to generating content that AI finds for buyers before any contact with the seller is made.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) has become an essential extension of SEO.

SEO helps your content get found and indexed, and AEO helps your expertise become part of the answer.

Good content should satisfy both parts of the optimization objective — continuing to help you get discovered, while also directly answering buyers’ questions, publishing original frameworks and evidence, demonstrating first-hand expertise, and making pages easy for AI systems to understand and cite.

Web content now needs to be structured so that AI tools can extract and cite it directly in their answers, in addition to still ranking well in traditional search.

This matters even more once you look at what happens after AI recommends a vendor. Semrush found that 75% of buyers trust AI vendor recommendations — but almost all of them verify before committing: 71% go on to visit the vendor’s website, 63% search for the company on Google, and 38% check reviews on G2 or similar platforms. Being mentioned by AI gets you noticed; what buyers find in the next few clicks decides whether that notice turns into anything.

There’s also a genuine opportunity here for smaller businesses without big marketing budgets: only 7% of buyers say brand recognition is why they notice a vendor in an AI response, while 53% say it’s because the vendor closely matches their specific use case. Precision beats familiarity.

PR agencies will earn their keep as earned, third-party coverage becomes more valuable than what you publish on your own site — and it might even be time to justify sponsoring industry awards and events, as independent media mentions gain value.

Your sales team needs marketing support more than ever

Practical steps for AEO

Case studies
Get your case studies polished up and get them across LinkedIn, and where possible referenced by a third-party or trade publication. Earned, third-party coverage tends to get picked up and cited by AI more readily than content sitting only on your own website.

Transparent pricing
A challenge for many businesses where prices are available only on request. Pricing now needs to be visible, ideally using exact figures, or at least tiers/ranges, and where necessary showing security/compliance documentation, integration guides, and comparison pages.

FAQs
Use the exact, real language from your sales and discovery calls, and publish it as questions alongside direct answers — either as an FAQ page or as individual blog posts, depending on how often those questions come up.

Home-grown research
Data, surveys, or benchmarks your own company generates — not citing someone else’s study. Takes time and effort, but well worth it. (Marcus Sheridan was talking about a lot of this almost 10 years ago in They Ask, You Answer.)

Track AI citation visibility as a metric
Regularly check if your brand gets mentioned when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot a relevant question. This can be done manually or with a dedicated monitoring tool. Otterly.AI tracks brand mentions and citations across AI platforms and reports a “share of AI voice” against competitors.

What next?
It’s clear there’s an AI-assisted shift happening for both sellers and buyers. It might be logical to double down on sales activity and look for competitive advantage at the front line — but it’s also worth evaluating your marketing strategy, making sure your content accurately reflects what you do while directly targeting what your buyer needs.

Your content might already be doing that for you — worth checking.

Having the confidence to talk openly about your most closely guarded secret (price) might be a bigger challenge, but if your “Price on Request” model is shutting you out of hundreds of live conversations, it’s worth a rethink.

Thanks for reading.

Source: Semrush — How AI tools shape the B2B buying process (July 2026)