Your buyers ask Google. And ChatGPT.

Right now, someone is searching for exactly what you sell. They've identified their problem. They're looking for a solution. They are ready to spend money.

The only question is whether they find you or your competitor.

SEO is not dead. Writing it off is expensive.

Billions of searches happen every day. People are typing "B2B [your service]" or "best agency for X" or "how to fix Y" right now, ready to pick a supplier on the strength of what they read. SEO remains one of the most powerful lead gen channels that exists. The data on whether SEO is dead is unambiguous: it isn't.

What's changed is that AI overviews are taking up more of the page, click-through rates on some queries are dropping, and Google is rewarding depth, expertise and authority more heavily than before. The bar is higher.

But the bar being higher is not the same as the channel being dead. Writing off SEO because someone told you it's dead is the kind of mistake that costs you years of compounding traffic and high-intent leads.

But your buyers now have two ways to find you

Some still start in Google. Some now start in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini. A growing number use both, in the same buying decision, sometimes in the same hour.

This is the part most B2B leaders haven't fully absorbed yet. The buying journey has split. There are now two parallel routes from "I have a problem" to "I'm ready to talk to a supplier", and they run on different rules.

If you only show up in one, you're invisible to everyone using the other.

What's actually changed

Google rewards a specific set of signals. Keywords. Backlinks. Engagement. Technical soundness. Consistency. Most B2B leaders have at least heard of these.

Large language models reward a different set. Citable content. Entity consistency. Third-party mentions. Structured data. Authoritative sources. Most B2B leaders have not heard of any of this, and the people advising them often haven't either.

The two systems overlap but they are not the same. Content that ranks beautifully on Google can be invisible to ChatGPT because it isn't structured as a citable answer. Content that gets cited by ChatGPT can fail to rank because it isn't technically optimised for Google. The skill is building a strategy that earns visibility from both.

Why most of your competitors are getting this wrong

Most haven't started thinking about AI search as part of their lead gen strategy at all. They're still optimising for Google in the way they always have, hoping that's enough.

The ones who have started are mostly being led astray by very confident advice from people figuring this out as they go. The space is full of consultants who learned about AEO last month and are already selling certainty.

That is your window.

The Leads Already Looking

Live session, Thursday 7 May, 1pm-1:45pm (UK). Online.

The Leads Already Looking is a 45-minute live training that covers exactly how to get found across both Google and AI tools. You will leave with a 10-step plan for what to do next to start showing up for the leads who are already looking for you.

It's free for members of the AI Growth Community (who also get access to the recording)

This is live training. We do not teach last year's AI.

Heather Baker, MBA, is a B2B lead generation expert with more than two decades of experience and over 2 million leads generated. She is the founder of The AI Edit and creator of Humans in the Loop.