Get found by the AI your buyers already use
Enterprise buyers now research and shortlist with AI assistants before they talk to anyone. If the assistant cannot find you, understand you and check you, you are not on the list. Seven steps that fix that.
Search used to be the front door. For a growing share of enterprise buyers it is now an AI assistant: a question typed into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, and a short answer back. Gartner reports that 45% of B2B buyers used AI during a recent purchase. Forrester warns that AI answers “often deliver incomplete or unreliable information,” and that vendors must make sure “their claims can be validated through trusted external voices.”
That is the new bar. Being found is not enough. The assistant has to understand what you do, and it has to be able to check it. We call the work of meeting that bar answer-engine optimization, or AEO. Here is how we approach it with the startups we work with.
1. Say what you do in one sentence, everywhere
Assistants stitch answers together from many pages. If your homepage, LinkedIn, Crunchbase profile and press releases describe you four different ways, the answer comes back vague. Pick one sentence that names the buyer, the problem and the result, and use it word for word across every surface you control.
2. Publish an llms.txt
An llms.txt file at the root of your site is a plain-text summary written for AI assistants: who you are, what you sell, and links to the pages that matter. It takes an hour, costs nothing, and gives an assistant a clean, authoritative starting point instead of a crawl of your marketing pages.
3. Make your proof checkable
Logo walls do not survive an assistant’s scrutiny; named, dated, linkable evidence does. Case studies with the customer’s name and a date, press releases on wire services, certifications with registry numbers and analyst mentions all give the assistant something to cite. If a claim cannot be checked, assume it will be left out.
4. Get listed where assistants look
Assistants lean on third parties to corroborate. Neutral directories, industry rankings, marketplace listings and partner pages all count. Prefer sources that show their method and do not take payment for placement; they carry more weight with both buyers and models.
5. Answer the questions buyers actually ask
Write plain pages for the questions an evaluator asks: what it integrates with, how it is secured, how it is deployed, what it costs to pilot and who it is not for. An assistant asked “does this work with SAP?” answers well only if one of your pages says so.
6. Give agents a way in
The next step after being read by assistants is being used by agents. A Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector lets an AI agent query your product data, documentation or availability directly. Even a small, read-only connector signals that you are ready for agentic buying, and it puts you in the directories where agents are configured.
7. Check what the assistants say about you, monthly
Ask the major assistants the questions your buyers would ask, every month, and write down the answers. Wrong headquarters, outdated product names and missing customers are common. Fix the source pages, then check again. It is the cheapest competitive intelligence you will ever run.
The companies that win agentic buying will not be the loudest. They will be the easiest to find, understand and verify.
None of this requires a large budget. It requires consistency and evidence. If you sell to enterprises in retail and consumer goods, manufacturing, healthcare or education, you can see how SalesBook reads your company today in SalesBook, and tell us if anything is wrong.
Sources: Gartner, “Gartner Sales Survey Finds 67% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Experience,” March 9, 2026. Forrester, “Forrester’s 2026 Buyer Insights: GenAI Is Upending B2B Buying,” January 21, 2026.