G2's research shows a dramatic acceleration in AI adoption for B2B purchasing. The percentage of buyers starting their journey with an LLM surged from 29% to 50% in just four months. This signals a fundamental, non-negotiable shift in buyer behavior that marketing strategies must immediately address.
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The awareness and problem-solving stages of the buyer's journey, which historically relied on website content and search, are being fundamentally altered. Buyers now use AI to get synthesized, "unbiased" information, bypassing vendor websites entirely for their initial research, thus removing key intent signals for marketing teams.
Buyers now use AI to arrive with a full research dossier on your product, pricing, and competitors. This changes the GTM role from persuading customers with clever messaging to enabling their decision-making. The new focus is helping buyers quickly experience your product's value on their own terms.
The traditional goal of winning hearts and minds is now a two-step process. Marketers must first win over the "machines"—search algorithms and LLMs—that control 85% of content discovery, treating them as an influential, gatekeeping audience.
The percentage of marketers using AI daily has surged from 37% to 60% in just one year, indicating a massive behavioral shift. With 82% planning to increase their usage further, non-adopters are quickly becoming a small minority and risk being left behind.
With buyers completing nearly 80% of their research using tools like Generative AI before vendor contact, the linear funnel is dead. Traditional metrics like MQLs and SQLs are meaningless. Go-to-market strategies must be rewritten to influence buyers during their independent, non-linear discovery phase.
Instead of gating its valuable review data like traditional analyst firms, G2 strategically chose to syndicate it and make it available to LLMs. This ensures G2 remains a trusted, cited source within AI-generated answers, maintaining brand influence and relevance where buyers are now making decisions.
AI is making buyer journeys non-linear and compressed. Instead of a linear funnel, GTM strategy must shift to a continuous, customer-centric "flywheel" model. Buyers conduct deep research upfront, making direct sales engagement optional for some and requiring an always-on, value-first approach.
Unlike Google, which primarily handles discovery, AI models engage users in a Q&A process that guides them through consideration. This means when a user clicks through from an AI search, they are highly qualified and ready to convert, explaining the significantly higher conversion rates seen from this traffic source.
Marketers focus on using AI as a new tool, but the more profound shift is that customers now use AI for research, comparison, and even RFP generation, fundamentally altering the buying journey before they ever interact with a brand.
The rise of AI agents means website traffic will increasingly be non-human. B2B marketers must rethink their playbooks to optimize for how AI models interpret and surface their content, a practice emerging as "AI Engine Optimization" (AEO), as agents become the primary researchers.
