AI is fundamentally changing how B2B buyers research and evaluate suppliers. In our recent State of B2B Understanding study, buyers selected AI assistants more than any other interaction for judging fit (26.5%) - ahead even of a live supplier demo (19.9%).
The good news is that your website, case studies, and product descriptions can shape what those assistants say about you. Clear, substantive content gives them more to work with when explaining your value and comparing you with competitors.
Preparing for this shift doesn’t have to mean rewriting everything. Here are seven practical ways to make AI work harder for you when explaining your value to a buyer.
1. Say plainly what you do and who it’s for
At a hospital near my home, a slogan printed on a massive gas tank reads: “Making our world more productive.” I’ve often wondered what the company actually does.
In the same way, vague and aspirational messaging can also create problems when AI interprets your site. AI language models have a limited “context window”: the amount of information they can work with at one time. Before content reaches the model, the system retrieving it may select individual passages, summarize material, or truncate it.
You shouldn’t assume an AI will process your whole page, much less your whole website, together. A passage explaining your product might arrive without the introduction defining its audience. A result might be separated from its qualification.
Make important sections understandable on their own, with descriptive headings and enough context to preserve their meaning. This doesn’t mean you can’t use a slogan, but it needs to be accompanied by a descriptive subhead that makes the chunk independently understandable.
To do: Check whether your homepage clearly names your offering, audience, and use case. If you use an aspirational slogan, pair it with a descriptive subheading. Then audit your service pages and articles: can someone understand each important section without piecing together information from elsewhere?
2. Make your differences explicit
The same context window challenge makes it even more important to focus on your differentiators and eliminate fluffy, vague, or undifferentiated claims.
Since AI is likely to summarize your content, it’s important that the writing you feed into it speaks clearly about what makes you a better choice. If much of your writing leans on calling your product innovative, transformative, or cutting-edge, you risk wasting valuable AI context window on information that doesn’t put you ahead of your competitors.
Call out your differentiators explicitly. Don’t bury them in the middle of a paragraph at the bottom of your article. And to the extent possible, eliminate fluffy language that bloats context window without telling the AI why your offering is a good fit.
To do: Replace broad, vague claims with specific differences. Then, explain the consequences of this differentiation to your buyer. Ask: “If someone reduced this entire page or article to three sentences, would the reason to choose us remain?”
3. Connect capabilities to business problems and successful outcomes
Buyers aren’t asking AI about your service offering – they’re trying to solve a problem. Your content needs to position your product as the solution to that problem, so that AI can clearly make the connection between the buyer’s query and your content.
Take for example a “call center transformation” solution. Messaged that way, it could take a couple logical leaps for an AI to consider you a good-fit recommendation. The solve is to explicitly make the connection: discuss frustrations around bad call experiences alongside outcomes like shorter wait times, faster resolutions, and happier agents that treat customers better.
To do: Ensure that each of your capabilities is connected to the business problem it solves and the solution it drives. Use a simple sequence: client problem → how your capability helps → business benefit. Consider adding questions and answers on your product or service pages and adding a general FAQ section of your website.
4. Tell the same story across all of your content
AI is a lot more likely than a human to catch small discrepancies across your marketing content. In fact, we’ve seen AI readily surface these issues while doing our own product purchase research. Who are you more likely to buy from: the brand that shows up consistently and accurately, or the one that flip-flops like a sleazy salesperson?
To do: Audit your materials for outdated service descriptions, positioning, and claims. Triage content, prioritizing pages containing contradictions that could impact your buyer’s judgement of fit. Establish agreed descriptions of your offering and differentiators, then rewrite or retire content as needed.
5. Back up claims with proof
When AI summarizes your offering alongside competitors, your claims can lose the persuasive framing of your website or sales pitch. “We improve efficiency” sounds like everyone else. A documented result gives buyers and their AI assistants something specific to assess, compare, and cite. Evidence helps your value remain concrete when someone else does the explaining.
To do: Connect your most important claims to case studies, research, or customer results. Explain the client’s problem, what changed, and the outcome, including the timeframe and relevant qualifications. Make that evidence publicly accessible and link it directly to the claim it supports.
6. Use markup, not markdown
AI needs a simple way to catalogue pages with a little more detail than traditional meta tags provide. A common solve is to use “Schema Markup” on each of your web assets like pages, articles, and podcast episodes. This gives AI a bit more detail as to what’s included on your page, like the author, date and place of publication, and information to help it understand whether this page is an episode of a larger podcast or a one-off article.
At the time of writing, Google recommends formatting this markup as “JSON-LD.” Here’s the official site to pass to your web team.
A common misconception is that AI agents also need a simplified version of your entire webpage, typically delivered in markdown format. Google has said this is unnecessary, and could actually make AI understanding worse. Since agents can read and understand layout and images, it’s better to let them read your real page – and it makes your life easier, too!
To do: Add schema markup to all your marketing content that’s served on the public web. Avoid creating separate markdown-formatted versions of these items.
7. Check how AI describes your business to a buyer
Checking your business’ presence on AI is not as simple as asking ChatGPT about your brand. OpenAI's responses can take into account what they know about you and where you are (see here for details), even going so far as to recommend travel itineraries based on the type of work you do. When you search your own company, AI will return an answer that includes info specific and private to your account, so it’s crucial to ensure you’re asking a public instance with no other context or memory.
To do: Open an incognito window in Chrome. Navigate to several AI tools and for each, ensure you are using a logged-out, free version of the tool. Don’t just ask the tools to tell you about your brand – also check if you appear in business-problem queries that your clients are likely to ask.
More and more, buyers are using AI to find and explain your business before they reach out. The content you publish gives that explanation its substance: what you do, who you help, why you’re different, and what evidence supports your claims.
You can’t control every mention, but you can give buyers and their AI assistants a clearer, better-supported reason to consider you.