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AI-powered search is quickly becoming a hot spot in B2B software purchasing. New research found that 71% of shoppers rely on AI chatbots at some point in the software search process, and 51% now start their search with an AI chatbot more often than with Google.
In G2’s report, “The Answer Economy: How AI Search is Rewiring B2B Software Buying,” AI-powered chatbots are now the number one source influencing buyer lists at 54%, ahead of software review sites at 43% and vendor sites at 36%. In other words, many B2B buyers now receive a set of recommendations before they even visit your website or talk to sales.
For marketers, this changes the issue of visibility. You’re no longer just trying to rank, earn a click, or drive traffic. You’re trying to make sure that AI systems understand your product well enough to include it in the response in the first place.
The report’s message is pretty straightforward: If AI doesn’t make you stand out soon, you may never be considered.
Visibility now starts within the response
G2’s framing is useful because it treats AI visibility as a go-to-market issue, not a search trend. The report states that visibility in AI-powered search depends on getting the answer rather than getting the click, which represents a significant shift for B2B teams that still measure success primarily through rankings, visits and page-level performance.
Research suggests that shoppers have shifted from using search for reference to using AI for synthesis. This means they don’t just ask where to look. They ask AI tools to compare vendors, summarize strengths and weaknesses, and return a set of actionable recommendations within minutes.
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Efficiency gains help explain why this behavior continues to persist. G2 found that 53% of buyers say software research is more productive with AI-powered research than with traditional research, up from 36% just seven months earlier, and 86% said they have increased their use of AI-powered chatbots for software research in the past year.
This leaves marketers with a harder truth than “optimization for AI.” If shoppers form first impressions on the chatbot’s responses, message clarity, category suitability, reviews, and third-party validation all become factors in whether the AI can confidently describe and recommend you.
The candidate list will be created first
The report pushes this point further by showing how much purchasing behavior has compressed. Buyers used to spend hours or days creating comparison spreadsheets and manually narrowing down a list. Now, as G2 says, many are effectively “one-shotting” the shortlist with a single chatbot message.
This changes the competitive dynamic in B2B marketing, as candidate selection occurred after multiple touchpoints with suppliers. Now it can happen before a vendor has generated a site visit, captured intent data, or triggered any of the signals marketers are accustomed to acting on.
It also increases the cost of weak positioning. G2 found that 69% of buyers said AI chatbots surfaced information that led them to choose a different supplier than they expected, and 85% said they thought more highly of a supplier the AI mentioned in a response. If your brand is misunderstood, missing, or poorly differentiated, AI can redirect deal before your team even knows it exists.
For marketers, the bottom line is not that traditional search or vendor websites stop mattering. G2 finds that 80% of buyers still use Google at some point along the way, but AI is now shaping discovery and picklist formation much earlier, meaning B2B visibility is increasingly becoming a matter of being found everywhere and increasingly being clearly understood where the AI is looking.
Link to report. (No registration required)
