More than half of B2B software buyers now begin their research with an AI assistant rather than a search engine. In a 2026 G2 survey of more than a thousand buyers, 51% said they reach for a tool like ChatGPT more often than Google, up from 29% a year earlier, and one in three reported buying from a vendor they had not heard of until the assistant brought it up.
Being one of the names an assistant recommends is becoming its own channel, and it does not work like ranking on Google. The leads it sends tend to be further along in their decision than a typical searcher, which makes them some of the warmest you will get. Whether you show up at all depends on how an assistant decides who to trust, and on whether your pages read as clearly to a model as they do to a person. It also depends on how you are described in the places it looks beyond your own site. What follows is how to earn that spot, and how to handle the people it sends you.
An assistant recommends what it can read, understand, and trust. It draws on the content it was trained on and, increasingly, on pages it fetches in the moment to answer a live question. That means two things decide whether you show up. The first is whether your own site clearly explains what you do, in language a model can lift cleanly into an answer. The second is whether other sources describe you consistently, because a name that appears the same way across many places is one an assistant can repeat with confidence.
The pages that surface in AI answers tend to be the ones that answer a real question directly. If a buyer asks an assistant "what is the best way to brief a sales rep before a call," the content most likely to be quoted is a page that asks roughly that question and answers it in plain terms underneath. This is worth doing deliberately. Phrase headings the way a buyer would phrase the question, then answer them honestly in the first sentence or two, before any sales framing. Content built to be extracted is content that gets cited.
Clarity for a person and clarity for a model overlap more than people expect. Plain explanations, an honest FAQ, and consistent naming all help. Structured data, the machine-readable summary of what your business is and what you offer, gives an assistant a clean version of the facts rather than asking it to infer them. One detail catches many sites out: a number of them quietly block the crawlers that AI assistants use, often without realizing it. If you want to be cited, you have to let those crawlers in, which is a small change to a single configuration file.
An assistant synthesizes across sources, so your own site is necessary but not sufficient. Reviews, directories, comparison pages, and mentions on other reputable sites all feed the picture a model forms of you. You do not control these the way you control your homepage, but you can influence them by being clear and consistent everywhere your business is described. The goal is that anyone, human or model, who looks you up comes away with the same simple account of what you do and who you are for.
A visitor who arrives through an assistant is usually further along in their buying decision than a typical searcher. They described their problem specifically enough to ask, and the assistant handed them your name as part of an answer, which is closer to a referral than to a cold click. They tend to land later in their thinking, with a sharper question, which is exactly the kind of lead that converts at a higher rate.
When a lead arrives from an AI assistant, Leadop flags that in the briefing a rep reads before the meeting, alongside what the person did on your site, so a high-intent visitor who came in through a newer path is recognized rather than treated like a stranger.