Your Prospects Are Using AI to Research Your Products — and Skipping Your Website

For years, marketers operated under a simple assumption: if someone were interested in your product, they’d eventually visit your website. That assumption drove billions of dollars in spending on SEO, paid search, landing pages, product pages, white papers, case studies, marketing automation, and website redesigns. We wanted to get people to our digital front door because once they arrived, we could control the story. That model is breaking.

Today, a prospect can open ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or another AI platform and ask, “What’s the best product for solving this problem?” They can ask it to compare your product against three competitors, explain your weaknesses, summarize customer complaints, identify pricing differences, and recommend which company should make their shortlist. They can do all of that without ever visiting your website.

And marketers don’t need to worry about this five years from now. It’s already happening.

Gartner reported in 2026 that 45% of B2B buyers used generative AI during a recent purchase, primarily to gather information about vendors and products. Those buyers used an average of seven different information sources during the buying process. Another Gartner analysis found that 60% of B2B buyers are using GenAI in some form to influence purchase decisions.

Think about that for a minute. AI isn’t just helping people write emails or summarize reports anymore. It’s becoming part of the buying process. Before prospects fill out your contact form, download your white paper, or talk to your salesperson, there’s a pretty good chance some of them have already asked an AI platform about you.

Google’s own evolution gives us a preview of what’s happening. Pew Research Center studied Google browsing behavior and found that when an AI summary appeared in search results, users were less likely to click traditional search-result links. That’s not surprising. If I ask a question and get a satisfactory answer right there, why would I click five websites to find the same information?

Now apply that behavior to B2B purchasing. Instead of Googling “best CRM platforms,” opening ten browser tabs and reading ten carefully polished vendor websites, I can ask AI: “Compare the leading CRM platforms for a 500-person company. Give me the advantages, disadvantages, approximate costs, implementation challenges and common customer complaints.” Thirty seconds later, I have a starting point.

Your prospect isn’t necessarily browsing the web anymore. AI is doing part of the browsing for them.

The interesting thing is that buyers were already heading in this direction before generative AI exploded. Gartner has found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer an overall buying experience without interacting with a sales representative, particularly when they’re gathering general information. It also found that 73% actively avoid suppliers that send them irrelevant outreach.

For years, thrketing departments waresponded withore marketing: more emails, more retargeting, more gated content, more lead nurturing, more SDR calls a,nd more “just checking in” messages. AI gives the buyer a much more attractive alternative. They can research your company without talking to your company.

That’s why I think marketers need to reconsider the idea that the corporate website is the center of the brand. Your website is the place where you tell people what you want them to know. AI can also pull together what everybody else says about you—reviews, industry publications, technical documentation, news stories, forums, Reddit discussions, analyst commentary, and customer experiences.

That creates a problem marketers aren’t used to: your brand is increasingly what the internet says about you, not just what your marketing department says.

Signs already show this new behavior is becoming significant. Adobe Analytics analyzed more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail websites and reported that traffic coming from generative AI sources increased 693% year over year during the 2025 holiday season. Adobe also reported substantial AI-driven traffic growth across travel, financial services, technology and media.

Even more interesting is what those visitors did after they arrived. Adobe found that AI-referred retail visitors spent 45% more time on websites, viewed 13% more pages per visit a,nd were 33% less likely to imave thimmediately an visitors coom other sources. During the holiday season, AI-referred visitors also converted 31% better than other traffic sources.

That makes sense to me. By the time some of these people reach the website, AI has already done part of the qualification. They’ve researched the category. They’ve compared products. They’ve asked questions. They’ve narrowed their choices. They’re not necessarily coming to your website to discover you. They’re coming to validate what they’ve already learned.

That represents a fundamental change in the marketing funnel. The traditional digital journey was something like Google → website → content → lead → salesperson. The emerging journey could increasingly become question → AI → shortlist → website validation → salesperson.

The website doesn’t disappear. But its role changes.

For decades, marketers have obsessed over one question: “How do we rank on Google?” That’s still important, but marketing teams should start asking another question: “What does AI say about us?”

Try it yourself. Ask ChatGPT about your product category. Ask it for the top five companies. Ask it to compare your company with your biggest competitors. Ask why somebody should buy your product. Then ask why they shouldn’t. Ask what customers complain about. Finally, ask which company it would choose.

You might not like the answers.

More importantly, you may discover that the website your company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars redesigning isn’t controlling the conversation nearly as much as everyone in the marketing department assumes.

This also means marketers now have another audience. We used to create content for people, then learn to create content that Google could understand. Now we need to think about how AI systems discover, interpret and summarize information about our products.

That doesn’t mean stuffing pages with keywords for ChatGPT. In fact, I think it means almost the opposite. Clear product information matters. Technical documentation matters. Independent reviews matter. Customer conversations matter. Credible third-party coverage matters. Original research matters. Consistent information across the internet matters. And having something genuinely useful to say matters.

AI doesn’t care that your homepage has a beautiful hero image, an inspirational mission statement, and a video of your CEO walking through the corporate headquarters. It’s trying to answer somebody’s question.

Salespeople aren’t going away either. Their role may actually become more valuable later in the process. Gartner found that 69% of B2B buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a salesperson. In other words, the prospect may not need a salesperson to explain what the product does. They need someone knowledgeable enough to explain whether everything they’ve already learned actually applies to their situation.

Marketers therefore need to think about another metric alongside traffic, rankings, click-through rates, leads, and conversions: AI visibility. When somebody asks an AI platform about your category, does your company show up? Which competitors show up? What does the AI think you’re good at? What does it think you’re bad at? Where is it getting that information? And ultimately, would it recommend your product?

For the last twenty years, digital marketing has largely operated in a search-and-click economy. We fought for search rankings because the goal was to earn the click and get the prospect onto our website.

We’re rapidly moving toward something different: an ask-and-answer economy.

Your next customer may research your company, compare your product, eliminate two of your competitors and form an opinion about your brand before you even know they exist.

They may eventually visit your website.

But by then, the most important part of the sale may have already happened.

The new marketing challenge isn’t just getting prospects to click on your website. It’s making sure your company is part of the answer.

I can also make this more opinionated and provocative, especially around the idea that companies are still pouring money into website redesigns and SEO while buyer behavior shifts elsewhere.