Most B2B marketing is aimed at a moment that’s already over.

The demo. The follow-up sequence. The objection handling. The pricing page nobody can decide the layout of.

All of it assumes the buyer arrives undecided and you get to move them.

They don’t arrive undecided.

One survey of B2B buying groups found that 94% of them had a ranked shortlist put together before they spoke to any seller, and 95% of the purchases went to a vendor who was already on that list on day one.

So the call isn’t the sale. The call is the paperwork.

I’ve been on the wrong side of this and I didn’t notice for months.

A while back I was running ads to a landing page, a few hundred bucks at a time, and the leads looked fine. People booked. People showed up.

And almost nobody bought.

I assumed my messaging was off. It probably was, a bit, it usually is.

But the actual pattern, looking back, is that most of those calls started with the prospect telling me which competitor they were already leaning toward and asking me to explain the difference.

That’s not a sales conversation. That’s an appeal hearing.

By the time someone talks to you they’ve read six things about your category, none of which you wrote, and formed an opinion you now have to argue against with a screen share.

The uncomfortable part is where the reading happens now.

For software buyers it has moved, quickly. G2’s numbers say 51% of them now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% in April 2025, and 69% ended up choosing a different vendor than the one they walked in planning to buy, based on what the assistant told them.

Think about what that means for you specifically.

There’s no impression count for it. No query report. No ranking to check. No way to know you were left out of an answer, or what the answer said about you, or which three competitors got named instead.

You just get fewer calls and slightly worse ones and no explanation.

This is the same trick as the smoke and mirrors problem but one step upstream. Back then the marketing industry sold you tactics for a moment that didn’t matter much. Now it’s selling you tactics for a moment you never get to see.

And predictably, the response has been an enormous amount of noise.

There are agencies selling “AI search optimization” retainers already. There are checklists. There is, I promise you, a course.

My favorite example of how thin this is: everyone spent a year telling each other to publish an llms.txt file. Somebody actually went and checked the server logs, and while 28% of 137,210 domains had published one, 97% of those files got zero traffic in a month. Three quarters of the bots that did read them weren’t AI tools at all.

An entire best practice, dutifully implemented, read by nobody.

Same crowd, by the way, that keeps quoting the Gartner line about buyers spending 17% of their time meeting suppliers. Nobody can find the source. It just gets passed along, deck to deck, because it sounds right.

So what actually moves it, as far as anyone can tell?

Being talked about. Not being linked to.

When Ahrefs correlated brand attributes against AI Overview mentions across 75,000 brands, web mentions came in at 0.664 and backlinks at 0.218, and to their credit both they and the people who wrote that up say loudly that this is correlation, that the numbers are weak, and that the effect is wildly different on ChatGPT than on Google.

So treat it as a hint, not a law. But it’s the same hint everything else gives.

Which is annoying, because being talked about isn’t a tactic you can buy on Tuesday.

It’s the podcast episode. The Reddit thread where you answered the question properly. The comparison post someone else wrote. The review nobody asked you for. The mention in a newsletter you don’t control.

All of it slow, all of it unattributable, all of it gruntwork.

Which is exactly why almost nobody does it, and why it still works.

I’d also stop treating “I don’t know where this lead came from” as a measurement failure to be solved with better tracking. It’s not. It’s the shape of the thing now. Most of your marketing happens in rooms you’re not in, in conversations you can’t log, and the only lever you have is being worth mentioning when it comes up.

The good news, if you want it, is that this is a bar problem and the bar is low. Your competitors are also just sitting there polishing their demo.

Stop rehearsing the call.

Go win the shortlist.