The shift in buyer behavior and decision-making is undeniable. Here’s why that’s more opportunity than risk, and what you can do to turn it into pipeline.
Make no mistake: LLMs and Google AI summaries are cannibalizing B2B SEO traffic. Statistics galore to prove it, but let’s give you Forrester’s: 30-35% YoY declines in organic traffic in 2026 for their clients (in line with what we’re seeing for ours, for what it’s worth), and projected subsequent drops of 50-75% by the end of 2027.
Now here’s why it probably doesn’t matter: around 2/3 of organic traffic for mid-market B2B services companies is branded (people who already knew you), and the actual non-branded traffic converts and evolves to qualified leads at a much lower rate than branded. Sorry to break it to you, but unless you’re the exception, your content efforts weren’t bringing much inbound pipeline in the first place.
And the good news is that when you’re at near zero, there’s nowhere to go but up, so let’s get to how you can actually capitalize on what’s an undeniable shift in buying behavior.
Get the boring out of the way
Schema markups, FAQs, key takeaway boxes… the new technical SEO. You have to do it, but that’s table stakes, like the doors of a shopping mall: if they’re closed people won’t come in, but opening them by itself doesn’t bring foot traffic. Now let’s get to the “how do I get ChatGPT and Claude to talk about me” part:
Step up your editorial game
- Focus on bottom-funnel topics: Old-school SEO was about educational and top-funnel content because that’s where the volume was, but while Google behaved like the Yellow Pages, pointing you to companies with answers, LLMs are more like a concierge, guiding you themselves first and only pointing to the right company once they prescribed it as the best solution. So what not to do: “Private vs. Public Cloud: Pros and Cons.” So 2015. Instead: “Workload spike thresholds that justify a switch from public to private cloud”. And besides the funnel focus, this article also has:
- Original POV, and if it’s contrarian or controversial even better. For example, emphasizing how most experts say the threshold to switch to private is revenue, and why it’s nonsense to use that instead of spikes. Not forcing controversy, of course, but if you truly believe it by all means share it with the world. This article is a little like that, where I’m essentially saying that SEO is overrated in mid-market B2B. This starts getting you in sharing and citation territory, along with:
- Your own data, whether it’s from your own clients or surveys, or aggregated research from 3rd parties (benchmarks compiled, public info scraping). It doesn’t need to be a rigorous thesis approved by a scientific journal, simply directionally insightful and honest.
- More video: people do business with people, so put your subject matter experts out there. Video builds far more trust and gets more reach than text, which anyone can now generate with AI. LLMs appreciate this too, and Google’s AI summaries especially favor YouTube, since Google owns it. If you’re selling an iPhone case, maybe a slick image and a funny tagline gets the job done. But good luck selling a $300K cloud migration without a human connection.
Measure
Of course I was going to say this. First, in Google Analytics you can already see how much traffic and conversions are coming from LLMs, by landing page and therefore service line. Even better if you pair it with your CRM to understand how that’s evolving to qualified leads and clients. Another good thing about traffic from AI is that it’s way more likely to convert and become a qualified lead (3-5 times higher). It makes sense, right? Since the LLMs filtered out non-serious inquirers and put in a good word for you with the serious ones. I’ve already seen multiple of our clients closing deals that came from LLMs, and the only way to know is to track it.
But you need to appear in LLMs in the first place, and the challenge there is that LLMs don’t share data of what topics and prompts are triggering your mentions, like Google Search Console does with impressions in organic results. But you can get good estimates using tools like Semrush or Ahrefs (there are many others), that have bots constantly pinging LLMs and gathering that data. At Condor we’re building our own database focused on topics, prompts and brands particular to the tech services industry (if you’re interested let me know and I’ll give you access).
Keeping a pulse on which topics are getting you discovered, and whether those discoveries actually turn into leads and clients, should tell you how to continue adjusting your content strategy.
-Ad- spend some money
Would you bet everything on a still unknown beast that will take time to see if it works and is changing by the minute? The good thing is that generating great content is like drinking water, always a good idea and has multiple benefits. One of them, often underutilized, is that you can and should repurpose and distribute across multiple channels, with paid media being the most important one since you fully control the target audience and the impact is immediate.
I’m a fan of paid social for “targeted awareness”, where you only count metrics from your ICP and target companies to measure performance (video views, remarketing pool size, visits, accounts touched). This should at least force people into asking LLMs about you if they don’t bring you up themselves. Or why not pay LLMs directly: OpenAI just launched its self-serve ad platform for ChatGPT that I’m all about testing, the sooner the better so you don’t lose the first mover advantage. If you’re already running paid search, start with the best performing keywords as the targeting (OpenAI calls it “hints”). And finally there’s content syndication, media placements and, particularly helpful for LLM citations: digital PR and earned media (YouTube channels, podcasts).
Pick your spots and go
Generating genuinely great content and then putting real money behind it takes time, effort, and budget, so you won’t be able to pull it off for every service and offering you have. Focus on the 1-2 where you’re already differentiated and competitive.
I see the death of SEO and the rise of AI search more like an opportunity than a threat, and hopefully now you feel the same. Which doesn’t mean you can relax though, as Ray Dalio says: “If you’re not worried, you need to worry -and if you’re worried, you don’t need to worry”.
