AI search

Your buyer now uses AI to research, compare, and build a shortlist before they ever talk to your team. They trust peers over your pitch. And AI shows them everything about your brand, good or bad. Most GTM playbooks were built before any of this was true.

Quick Take

I’ve spent the past couple of years writing about AI search, brand trust, team structure, workflow design, and leadership. Each felt like a separate topic. It took a room full of CMOs and one word (attribution) to help me see they’re all connected. They all trace back to the same root cause: how your buyer changed.

This newsletter connects the dots. Four shifts in buyer behavior are breaking how you reach customers, how you measure results, and how your teams work together. Most teams are feeling the symptoms but haven’t seen the full picture yet.

Key takeaways:

• Your buyer’s AI builds the shortlist now. If AI can’t find your content or doesn’t understand what you’re best at, you’re not in the conversation.
• AI shows your buyer whatever it finds about you, from every source, all at once. Consistent signals build trust. Mixed signals create confusion. If it’s unclear, AI may fill in the gaps on its own.
• Influence is moving to peers, communities, and real human connections. AI reinforces those voices over yours.
• Connected, personalized experience across the full customer lifecycle is now the minimum to compete. Delivering it requires breaking down silos between marketing, sales, and CS.
• Replace attribution and per-department KPIs with three metrics your customers actually feel: time to value, customer satisfaction, and net revenue retention. These are numbers your CFO already watches.
• These four shifts don’t each break one thing. They ripple across your content strategy, your metrics, and your team structure at the same time. That’s why everything feels like it’s in motion.

AI Video Explainer and AI Podcast Versions of This Newsletter

To support different learning styles, this newsletter is available as an 7-min AI video explainer and a 16-min AI podcast with two AI hosts. If you haven’t seen these AIs in action, they’re worth a view. The tech is advancing in amazing ways. I used Google’s NotebookLM to create these and personally reviewed them for accuracy and responsible AI use. (There are some typos in the AI explainer but they are minor.)

How This Started

A couple weeks ago, I was co-presenting on a human+AI transformation journey during CMO Coffee Talk with Megan Cabrera, VP of Marketing Operations at Sophos. We had 200+ CMOs and marketing leaders on Zoom. The conversation was flowing. Then the topic of attribution came up, and I had a reaction I wasn’t expecting.

I said what I’ve long been thinking. The chat on Slack lit up with comments like “spot on” and “preach” to “Liza for president.”

Matt Heinz, Founder of Heinz Marketing and CMO Coffee Talk Host, shared his thoughts on the topic.

“We’ve been debating attribution in CMO Coffee Talk for years. It always gets heated because every CMO is stuck between a CEO that wants credit assigned and a buying process that makes clean credit impossible.

Liza nailed something most of us have been feeling but hadn’t said out loud: we keep trying to fix attribution when the buying process it was built to track doesn’t exist anymore.

When the buyer’s AI has already built a shortlist before your rep picks up the phone, arguing about which touch gets credit is the wrong conversation. We’ve argued about who gets credit for the deal. Meanwhile nobody’s asking whether the customer felt like we actually helped them buy.”

I wrote about it in a LinkedIn post that struck a nerve. The comments and DMs kept coming. But the more I sat with the response, the more I realized attribution was just one symptom. I started listing other GTM practices that feel like they’re running on borrowed time. The list got long. Then I noticed they all trace back to how your buyer changed.

Here are the four buyer shifts driving the change, and what they mean for your GTM playbook.

Four Ways Your Buyer Changed

1. You might not make the consideration set.

Your buyer’s AI builds the shortlist now. It’s not your SDR’s email or your Google ad. AI.

I ran this test myself. I opened ChatGPT as a VP of Sales Ops looking for a sales engagement platform. I gave it my company size, my pain points, the outcomes I cared about, and asked it to rate the top platforms. I ran the same prompt in Google AI Mode, Claude, and Perplexity.

I didnt specify the vendor names in my prompt. But each one built comparison tables, rated Outreach, Salesloft, Gong, Clari, and HubSpot Sales Hub on my criteria, and made a recommendation in seconds.

When I looked at what AI actually cited:

• Review sites like G2. Cited.
• Reddit and community forums. Cited.
• Vendor blogs. Cited.
• Generic listicles. Cited.
• Constellation ShortList for Sales Engagement. Not cited.
• Forrester Wave for B2B Sales Tech. Not cited.
• Gartner MQ for CRM Customer Engagement. Not cited.
• Anything behind a form. Nowhere to be found.

The buyer never visited a vendor website. AI formed its opinion from open sources. Content behind a gate didn’t exist.

If AI can’t find you, can’t access your content, or doesn’t understand what you’re best at, you’re not on the list. The buyer never knows you were an option.

I shared more on the gated content piece in a recent LinkedIn post. Here’s the AI search prompt and the full response from Google AI Mode.

2. Whatever AI finds about you, it shows your buyer. Good or bad.

You don’t get to choose what your buyer sees first anymore. AI pulls from everywhere: your website, support documentation, G2 reviews, Glassdoor, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts from your employees, case studies (if they’re accessible), news coverage.

It reads all of it at once and looks for patterns. Consistent signals build trust and mixed signals create confusion. AI may show both or make up a response. And you may not like what it serves up.

I experienced this myself when I received an invitation to be listed in a business directory. I didn’t schedule a call or review their materials. I asked AI. Within seconds, it showed me red flags in their business practices that sealed the decision before they could make their pitch. Here are my prompt and the AI response.

Your buyers are doing the same thing when they evaluate you.

This means your brand needs to hold up across every channel AI reads. Here’s a simple framework I use for thinking about this:

• Visibility – Does AI know you exist as a credible option?
• Sentiment – Is what AI says about you accurate, helpful, and consistent?
• Recommendation – Does AI suggest you for the right situations?

If you haven’t checked how AI describes your company and your category, that’s a good place to start this week.

3. Influence and decisions are moving to peers, communities, and real human connections.

Recent research from Forrester (2025) and TrustRadius (2025) shows that B2B buyers rely most on other buyers, such as peers, customers, and online reviews, as their most trusted sources, well ahead of vendor sales reps and marketing content. AI works the same way; when it answers questions, it tends to pull from those same places, including review sites, communities, and real customer stories, not your latest pitch.

I saw this play out in real time. A GTM VP in one of my communities asked a simple question: “We’re evaluating AI SDRs. Anyone using one generating good results?” Within an hour, four peers jumped in with honest takes, including one who named a vendor the VP hadn’t considered and another who said prospects kept dropping off because the AI talked in circles instead of giving straight answers. The VP told me she narrowed her shortlist that afternoon based entirely on those responses. No demo, no sales call, no content download. The vendors on her original list had no idea they’d already been cut.

I belong to several GTM and exec communities like Pavilion, Marketing AI Institute, Women in Revenue, AI Marketing Forum, CMO Huddles, and CMO Coffee Talk. That’s where real conversations happen, people being completely transparent, opening their networks and helping each other. People share their vendor experiences, offer recommendations, foster introductions, and make decisions. Relationships and trust are built with professional reputations put on the line.

The places where real influence happens are getting harder to measure and impossible to control. This could be a conversation at an industry event, a recommendation in a Slack community, an honest review from a customer who actually uses your product every day. In many cases, these go beyond supporting your sales funnel; they are the funnel.

AI handles the research. Humans handle the relationships. And they’re reinforcing each other.

4. Connected, personalized experience is now table stakes.

Your buyers have always wanted a smooth experience across every interaction with your company across marketing, sales, onboarding, and support. For years, this was a differentiator. If you delivered it, you stood out. Most companies couldn’t, so the bar stayed low.

That bar’s now higher.

AI makes it possible to deliver connected experiences at scale. Which means buyers now expect it. Not having it is no longer an acceptable gap. It’s a reason to choose someone else.

And here’s why this shift has the biggest internal implications. You can’t deliver a connected experience if your teams run separate systems, measure separate KPIs, and hand off customers like a relay baton. When marketing says one thing, sales delivers another, and customer success solves different problems entirely, AI makes those gaps visible to buyers faster than ever.

This is the shift that forces the internal rethink: how your teams are structured, how they share data, and how they measure success. Darcy Kurtz, CMO of WP Engine, reinforces this:

“I’ve sat in both chairs. CMO building demand, CRO accountable for revenue. What you see from the revenue side is how much context disappears between teams. Marketing builds one story, sales tells another, onboarding starts from scratch. The customer feels every seam. AI makes it worse because the whole journey happens faster now. There’s no time to cover the gaps.

You don’t fix this with better handoffs. You fix it by making marketing, sales, and CS stop operating like three different companies.”

What This Means for Your GTM Playbook

If these were four separate shifts, you could address them one at a time. Update your SEO strategy here, fix a handoff there. But they’re not separate. They’re happening together, and they’re feeding each other. That’s why so many GTM leaders I talk to feel like everything is in motion at once. It is and it shares a root cause.

These four shifts ripple across how you reach your buyer, how you measure results, and how your teams work together, all at the same time.

How you reach your buyer

• Shift from SEO to GEO – The goal is getting cited by AI, not just ranking on a page. Gartner estimates brands will lose 25% of their web traffic as AI answers buyer questions directly. Your content now serves two audiences: humans who want story and connection, and AI that needs structure, clarity, and access. Anything behind a form is invisible to AI. That doesn’t mean every form disappears. A webinar registration or a personalized assessment is worth the form. But the thought leadership and expertise that builds your AI visibility needs to be findable.
• Audit every channel AI reads – Your website and G2 profile aren’t enough. Run the Visibility, Sentiment, Recommendation framework from Shift 2 across support docs, Glassdoor, Reddit, employee LinkedIn posts, and news coverage.
• Earn the voices AI amplifies – Make it easy for real customers to share real experiences. Show up where your buyers spend time. This is harder to scale and impossible to fake, which is exactly why it works.

Deb Wolf, CMO at Dataminr, shares sage advice.

“Here’s my advice to every CMO right now: stop what you’re doing and go be your own buyer. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode. Search for your company the way a prospect would. Ask it to compare you to your competitors. What comes back will tell you more about your go- to-market gaps than any dashboard.

Most of us are still optimizing a playbook we built for a buyer journey we haven’t personally experienced as a buyer. The shift is real, but you won’t feel the urgency until you see what AI actually says about you.”

How you measure what’s working

This is the one that triggers the strongest reactions when I bring it up with CMOs.

Everyone knows attribution is getting harder. Fewer people have said out loud that the real problem is your metrics were built for a buyer journey that no longer exists.

MQLs measure marketing activity, not buyer intent. Per-department KPIs (leads for marketing, close rates for sales, renewals for CS) optimize each team’s scorecard while the customer falls through the gaps between them.

An analysis of 478 B2B companies found that GTM effectiveness dropped from 78% in 2018 to 47% in 2025 (Martech.org, 2025). Less than half of every GTM dollar is producing results. That’s a measurement problem built on assumptions about buyer behavior that no longer hold.

Replace it with metrics your customers experience and care about:

• Time to value – how many days from signed contract to first live campaign, first threat detected, or first workflow created? This tells you whether your customer is getting results.
• Customer satisfaction – do they show up to your QBRs, respond to your CSM, and agree to be a reference? This tells you whether your customer trusts you.
• Net revenue retention – are existing customers expanding their contracts, adding more features, or increasing usage? This tells you whether your customer grows with you.

When customers get results, trust you, and grow with you, that’s a GTM engine that’s working.

I know what you’re thinking. “My CEO wants to know which campaign sourced the deal.”

Try this in your next leadership meeting:

“We’ve been asking which touch gets credit. But our buyer built their shortlist with AI before we knew they existed. Instead of tracking what we can’t see, what if we measured what our customer actually feels? How fast are new customers getting to value? Are they satisfied enough to expand? Is our net revenue going up or down?”

These are numbers your CFO already watches because they predict the revenue outcomes the board cares about.

You can keep tracking what you track today. But shift the weight toward outcomes your customers experience and away from activity metrics that no longer reflect how buyers actually buy.

How your teams work together

This is where it all comes together. And it’s the hardest part to change.

When buyers expect a connected experience across the full lifecycle, teams can’t operate as separate functions that hand off to each other. Every handoff loses context. Every silo creates a gap the buyer feels.

Most companies aren’t there yet, but the direction is clear. The Microsoft 2025 Work Trend Index found that teams are forming around goals, not functions, with AI helping people work across traditional boundaries. The emerging model points to journey teams that own customer outcomes end to end, with AI carrying context so the buyer’s story doesn’t restart every time they talk to someone new.

G2 just created their first-ever President of Go-to-Market role, consolidating marketing and revenue under one leader. When the company that runs one of the largest B2B review platforms restructures because buyer behavior changed, pay attention.

Sean McCaffrey at Cin7 is building this at the operational level. His team connected marketing, sales, and CS into one AI-native growth engine designed around how buyers actually buy. I wrote about his full approach in a recent newsletter.

This also changes how teams adopt AI. The value comes when AI connects workflows across teams, not when each department gets its own tools.

Go Deeper

Each of these areas has a full newsletter behind it. Here’s where to go next based on what’s most relevant to you:

• AI search and content visibility – Make Your Brand Sourced and a Top Result in AI Search | Standing Out When Web Traffic Declines
• Brand trust and AI perception – Brand Economics in the Age of AI | When AI Judges Your Brand Before Humans Do
• Team structure and customer outcomes – No Daylight: How AI is Reorganizing GTM Teams | How a Leading Cybersecurity Company Redesigned Marketing Workflows | 80% Meeting Rates: A Real-Life AI Growth Engine Built Around the Customer
• Metrics and leadership – The GTM Leadership Criteria That Worked for Decades Aren’t Enough Anymore
• Workflow transformation – Your AI Teammates Aren’t a Team Yet | The End of Handoffs

What’s Breaking Down and What’s Replacing It

Here’s the full picture in one view. Each of these connects back to one or more of the four buyer shifts above.

What’s NOT Dead

This is a big shift. But some things are getting stronger, not weaker. Brand matters more than it has in years because AI reads everything and looks for consistency. Human relationships are more differentiated than ever because everything else can be scaled. Strategic thinking is more important because AI exposes weak strategy faster. And content still matters but the format, distribution, and audience have changed.

Where to Start

You don’t need to rethink everything at once. But you do need to start seeing the full picture. Here are three things you can do this month.

• Run the AI search exercise from shift #1 for your own company – Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Google AI Mode as your target buyer. Search for solutions in your category the way a prospect would. Ask it to compare top vendors on a set of eval criteria and offer a recommendation with reasons why. The gaps will be obvious.
• Check your metrics against customer outcomes – In your next leadership meeting, ask each function lead to name one metric that measures the customer’s success, not the department’s. When marketing says MQLs, sales says close rate, and CS says churn, you’re looking at the misalignment.
• Find your worst customer handoff – Map what the customer actually experiences at the transition between two teams versus what each team thinks they deliver. That gap is your first redesign opportunity. Start there.

None of this requires starting from scratch. It requires seeing the full picture and deciding where to start.

If you run the AI search exercise, I want to hear what you found. DM me or drop it in the comments. The CMOs who’ve done this tell me it’s the most eye- opening 10 minutes they’ve spent this quarter.

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