Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are rewriting visibility practices for B2B companies. Forrester reports that 89% of B2B buyers have used generative AI at some stage of the buying journey. A separate survey of senior enterprise marketing leaders found that 97% realized a positive impact from answer engine optimization (AEO) in 2025.
B2B companies recognize the rapid change in brand visibility and citation occurring in AI Search, and they are reshaping their digital presence for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. These AI systems operate across different surface areas than previous marketing technologies, and what worked for SEO will not succeed in this new landscape. Given the expanded reach of AI Search, visibility now touches departments beyond marketing, with IT and legal playing a larger role. With proper planning across these three departments and stakeholders, AI Search can run successfully and with real benefit for many B2B companies.
AI Answer Engines and the Importance of Citation
B2B brands are in the early phases of what can be seen as the Citation Economy, in which a brand’s value is tied to its probability of being cited by an AI Answer Engine. AI Search visibility depends on signals across Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), which aims for placement in the answer box at the top of a query, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which strives for citation as a source within a generated answer. AEO and GEO rely on signals that range from the company’s website to trusted third parties, such as well-known business and technology media, to mentions in online forums, such as Reddit. The signals hold different weights, with corporate digital materials ranking lower than third-party mentions in the media, analyst reports, or comparison listings. Successful AI Search planning will incorporate strong signals from all areas.
Why SEO Practices Don’t Work in AI Search
For two decades, digital visibility was tied to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and managed largely by the marketing department. The Chief Marketing Officer measured success against familiar metrics: keyword rankings, web traffic, site-generated leads, and the digital pipeline. SEO and web traffic were the two measures that mattered for digital presence.
With AI Search, inclusion in AEO and GEO answers and citations will be the most powerful measurement and will require different tactics. This is because there are more areas for AI systems to measure, but there are also more areas that could be problematic for LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. One area that dilutes a company’s clarity is inconsistent company descriptions across its digital presence. A company may define itself as an “AI data-security platform,” but if recent business press articles call the company a “data loss prevention provider,” the LLMs may default to the press’sframing, or hedge between the two. Either outcome counts against the company, because the clarity of its category identity is diluted. In future AI Search results, the company could be ranked lower as a source, or the inconsistency in what the company does could be mentioned directly. Neither is a good result.
Why AI Search Has Ownership Beyond Marketing
Given the touchpoints for AI Search, including signal reflection that comes from public relations, branding, and third-party validation, marketing is the natural choice for overall ownership. However, there are aspects of AI visibility that mean the IT and legal departments will have active roles to play.
AI Search Requires More IT Input
The IT department played a significant role in SEO, monitoring processes like site crawl efficiency, JavaScript rendering, status codes, canonicalization, internal links, and Core Web Vitals. AI Search is still built on SEO fundamentals, but AI Search measures aspects of a corporate web presence that IT owns. Good AI visibility will draw from crawler governance, content consistency across systems, accessibility semantics, feeds, and infrastructure controls, and these areas are best managed by IT.
In addition, IT can oversee good site hygiene, such as identifying outdated or duplicate URLs that should be redirected or removed so they do not conflict with current messaging. Marketing will still own the visibility goals, positioning, and brand accuracy, but IT has a larger role to play in the management of the infrastructure that determines whether AI Search can find, parse, and represent the brand correctly.
AI Visibility Means More Collaboration with Legal
Corporate legal teams were not usually central to day-to-day SEO, although they already handled search-related activities such as monitoring for defamation, copyright issues, privacy violations, information removal requests, and reputation management. AI Search changes the scale and scope of legal’s involvement.
AI Search, such as Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and ChatGPT Search, synthesizes answers from multiple public sources and presents those answers with links or citations. If the underlying source material has errors, or if the model misreads or overgeneralizes content from those sources, the result can be inaccurate and potentially damaging to a brand. This is where legal counsel can play a role, navigating the largely untested process of correcting how AI systems describe a company.
Remediation for an incorrect AI citation goes beyond a simple website update. Teams may need to correct third-party source material, submit platform feedback or removal requests, adjust technical controls such as robots.txt directives or llms.txt files that govern which AI crawlers can access content, and then wait for recrawl. That is one reason legal is more involved in AI discovery, not only in remediation, but also in source governance, attribution, rights management, privacy compliance, claims substantiation, and ongoing monitoring of how AI systems surface the brand.
Conclusion
AI Search and the Citation Economy will not diminish marketing’s role in building brand visibility. The process for recognition by AI Search systems has elements that need direct involvement from the IT and legal departments. IT departments will have a more active role in maintaining site technology for accuracy, and legal will need to be able to step in to help with citation accuracy. Companies that involve all three departments as part of their AEO/GEO policies, including action plans and best practices, will be ahead of the game.
About
Anne Coyle is the founder of Coyle Emerald Narratives (CEN), an AI visibility firm that helps B2B technology companies get cited and recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. coyleemeraldnarratives.com
