AI Search Optimisation for B2B: How to Get ChatGPT Recommending Your Brand

In January, Forrester found that 94% of B2B buyers are using AI Search in the purchase journey. Not a niche group of early adopters. Almost all of them.

Yet most businesses still treat AI Search Optimisation for B2B as a consumer problem, because almost every example they see involves booking a restaurant or finding a gift.

The reality is very different. Tim Cameron-Kitchen, Founder of Exposure Ninja, explains why AI Search is now one of the highest-converting channels in B2B, and how B2B brands can get themselves recommended in AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Mode.

We’re using Semrush One, the platform we have paid for and used since 2013. You can try Semrush One with a 14-day trial, on us: https://exposureninja.com/semrushone.

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Why B2B Buyers Are Already Deep Into AI Search

When Exposure Ninja’s CEO, Charlie Marchant, spoke on-stage at Ecommerce Scotland, one attendee asked a valid question: Is AI Search Optimisation relevant for B2B businesses?

Tim Cameron-Kitchen explains why the doubt exists in the first place: “Most of the AI Search examples that you see out there are consumer-focused. And when Google or OpenAI does a demo, what do they show? They show people using these tools to book restaurants or find creative gift ideas.”

The data tells a different story. A G2 study published in April found that 51% of B2B software buyers started their research with an AI chatbot more often than Google, up from 29% eleven months earlier. 71% lean on AI chatbots at some point in the journey, and 69% chose a different vendor than they had planned based on what a chatbot told them.

That last number is the one to sit with. It means AI tools are not just a discovery channel; they are actively changing purchase decisions.

The complication is the size of the buying group. Forrester puts the average complex B2B purchase at 13 internal stakeholders and nine external participants.

As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it: “So more people, more independently using AI platforms to work out whether to buy from you or your competitors.”

Every one of those people can run their own research, form their own shortlist and bring it into the room. If your brand is missing from the answer, you are being ruled out before anyone speaks to your sales team.

AI Search isn’t just a B2C channel, it’s incredibly B2B. People are using ChatGPT whether they’re at work or at home, and the traffic that you’ll get from these AI tools typically converts way better than traditional organic traffic or even most paid traffic sources.

Tim Cameron-Kitchen
Founder

Why This Traffic Converts Better Than Traditional Organic

Volume is not the reason to care about AI Search. Quality is.

Tim Cameron-Kitchen is direct about how unusual this channel is: “The quality of the traffic that you get from these AI tools is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in digital marketing.”

Research puts AI Search traffic conversion at 14.2%, against 2.8% for Google organic. For every 100 visitors arriving from an AI tool, you would expect around 14 to become an enquiry, a call or a purchase.

The reported figure is also conservative, because plenty of AI-influenced buyers never click through from the chat window at all. They see you mentioned, then go and search your brand name in Google.

“In your analytics, that looks like a branded search, someone searching for your brand and converting. But when your sales team asks them how they found you, they say ChatGPT,” explains Tim Cameron-Kitchen.

That is why organic conversion rates start climbing without any obvious change in ranking. The work happened upstream.

“This is because by the time someone lands on your website from some AI research, they’ve already had their options synthesised, they know they want to go with you, and they’re now ready to take that next step. That’s good news for you and your sales team because they get to work with really qualified leads,” says Tim Cameron-Kitchen.

Benchmark Your Visibility and Sentiment Before You Change Anything

You cannot improve a position you have not measured, and in AI Search the only position that matters is your position relative to competitors.

Tim Cameron-Kitchen sets out the starting point: “The first step when we’re improving the visibility of a B2B brand in AI Search is to do some benchmarking. We need to know where you sit compared to your competitors so that we can start to spot the opportunities to move that visibility up.”

That benchmarking happens in Semrush One, one of our top-recommended AI visibility tools. In Semrush One, you can benchmark:

• AI Visibility: Visibility overview gives you a score out of 100.
• Mentions: How often your brand comes up.
• Citations: How often your pages are referenced in an answer.
• Cited Pages: The pages on your site being cited.

Then add competitors, either your own list or the suggestions the platform generates, and compare visibility, audience size and mentions side by side over time. That comparison, rather than your own trend line, is what tells you whether you are gaining ground with your AI Search Optimisation strategy.

You also want to check how AI tools are speaking about you. Tim Cameron-Kitchen argues: “It’s no good just being mentioned if those AI tools are talking about how rubbish you are, or they’ve got you confused with somebody else, or they’re not talking about the things that you know they should be talking about.” Plot sentiment against AI Share of Voice (SoV) and you get a clear read on where you sit.

Map the Topics Your Buying Committee Is Asking About

Prompt-level targeting does not scale in B2B.

“With AI tools, it often makes sense to target topics rather than individual prompts because the number of individual prompts that people use in these tools is so vast. They are incredibly long tail,” explains Tim Cameron-Kitchen.

The practical approach:

1. Identify the topics you need visibility for.
2. Find the most common questions inside each one
3. Build one content piece that answers the sub-questions.

Then look at where competitors appear, and you do not. Filtering topics and prompts for missing exposes the conversations your competitors are winning without you, and many of those gaps will be pages you already have that are simply too thin to earn a citation.

Prioritise topics by commercial intent, not by volume. As Tim Cameron-Kitchen puts it: “We tackle those content gaps in order of how commercial they are.”

That order matters most for niche businesses, which often talk themselves out of this work entirely because the topic volumes look too small to justify the effort.

We showed the value of this approach with our client, Accelex.

Accelex first came to us with around 8 Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) a month and a genuinely niche offering: helping alternative investors and asset servicers work with unstructured data. It is not a subject people ask ChatGPT about for fun, and not many people are asking about it at all.

Low volume does not mean low value, though: “If 100 people a month are having a conversation with ChatGPT about how to work with unstructured data if they’re an alternative investor, they could be worth a really good amount of money as high-quality leads.”

So we ran exactly the process above, mapping the high-intent, low-competition topics their buyers were asking about in both traditional search and AI Search, then building out solution pages and supporting content to target them.

Search traffic rose 17% year-on-year (YoY). Lead volume moved further, with the annual lead target exceeded by 112% at month nine, and the quality of those leads helped Accelex prove its concept ahead of acquisition by Carta in October 2025.

Get Recommended Where AI Tools Are Looking

“Digital PR has a new job, and that job is getting your brand mentioned and recommended in the type of websites that are being cited by these AI tools in their answers,” says Tim Cameron-Kitchen.

The topics and sources reporting in Semrush One show both the pages already being cited for you and the source opportunities, meaning the publications feeding your competitors’ visibility while ignoring yours.

Be selective. Volume of coverage is not the same as relevant coverage.

Where a source does look relevant, open the page and read the context your competitor is being mentioned in. If that framing would work for you, it goes on the plan.

Nobody should underestimate the effort involved. This is outreach to journalists and editors, relationship-building, and knowing when a publication will next update a roundup piece. It is a full-time discipline rather than a task you slot into an existing content calendar.

Track the Commercial Impact, Not Just the Clicks

The commercial case for AI Search Optimisation for B2B is already proven. Value Capital Funding, a B2B business, saw an 1,100% increase in leads from AI tools after applying this strategy.

You can track referral traffic from AI platforms in your analytics to see how much traffic and conversions are coming from AI Search.

But attribution will never be complete, so build a second source of truth. Tim Cameron-Kitchen recommends: “It’s a really good idea to get your sales team in the habit of asking people, ‘Where did you find us?'”

That one question catches the branded and direct traffic your analytics will always misfile, and the follow-up matters just as much: ask what they were actually asking the AI tool. That tells you which prompts are producing a pipeline.

Turn AI Search Visibility Into Pipeline

If you want to know exactly where your brand stands across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Claude, and what to do about it, our expert team can map your visibility, sentiment, topic gaps and source opportunities into a prioritised action plan.

Book a consultation call with our team to build the strategy that gets your B2B brand cited, recommended and converting in AI Search.