AI visibility: AI marketing that reaches decision makers
AI marketing isn't just content and ads anymore, it's how the buying committee actually finds you. Here's who's using ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overview, and why missing even one of them can cost you the sale.
Good marketing has always been about one thing: being in the right place at the right time. A billboard on the road your customer drives every day. An ad during the show they actually watch. A booth at the one conference their buyer attends.
AI marketing works the same way, except the "place" isn't a road or a channel anymore. It's a chat window. And the "right time" isn't a season or a campaign, it's the exact moment a specific person on a buying committee opens ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google AI Overview to ask a question and the response decides whether you get considered at all.
Why AI visibility fail
Most AI marketing advice treats visibility as one number to chase, get mentioned more, get cited more, show up in more answers. But a B2B sale isn't decided by scores. It's decided by specific people, at specific moments in a process that usually involves 6 to 10 stakeholders, and can climb to 14 or 15 once legal, security, and procurement get pulled in (Stealery).
More visibility, aimed at the wrong role, is the same outcome as no visibility. The sale still doesn't happen.
Be where the decision makers are, at the right moment.
Every stage in the journey matters, and none of them can be skipped. Discovery earns you a seat at the table. Evaluation and comparison keep you on the shortlist. But none of it holds if you're invisible at the one moment the decision actually gets made.
Who | Where | Decision Stage | Key Takeaway |
|---|---|---|---|
General demographic | Google AI Overview | Every stage, passively | Triggers on 82% of B2B tech queries, and B2B buyers click through its sources at 90% |
Champion (VP-Director) running the evaluation | ChatGPT | Discovery | Champions hold 16% of direct final-decision influence on their own. |
CTO, VP Engineering, Head of IT, Solution Architect | Claude | Early evaluation | Highest mention rate of any title across B2B SaaS buying committees, at 77.1%. Claude leads enterprise LLM usage at 32% share. |
CFO, COO, VP/Director with budget authority | Perplexity | Active comparison | Perplexity holds 24% share of purchase-intent queries. |
Procurement Lead, IT Security | Perplexity, Claude | Late-stage validation | Procurement now acts as the actual decision-maker in 53% of deals. |
Sources: Intelliarts, Thunderbit, MarGen, Instantly, Presenc AI, SQ Magazine, Belkins, Influ2, The Stacc, Genesys Growth
Know your gaps.
Knowing which role uses which engine, at which stage, only helps if you can see where your own brand actually sits inside that picture. A handful of tools now exist to help with exactly this, Otterly AI, Profound, Semrush, and others, each tracking some version of AI visibility.
Subsig approaches it a bit differently. It tracks your AI visibility ranking overall, and against the specific competitors you're actually up against, so you're not guessing whether you're ahead or behind.
It goes further than an aggregate score: you can see exactly which prompts you show up for, and how often, down to the individual query level, so you know precisely where you're being found and where you're not.
That's the difference between knowing AI marketing matters and knowing whether it's actually working for you.
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