‘Quantity down. Quality up’: B2B marketers urged to rethink search
As search volumes increase and clicks fall, B2B marketers need to adapt to the new playbook of LLM search.
· Marketing WeekBy Emily Manock 29 Sep 2026 12:57 pm
B2B marketers need to rethink how they measure search as AI changes the way buyers discover, research and evaluate brands, according to speakers at Forrester’s B2B Forum.
Gerald Murphy, search, AI, and consumer behaviour specialist who holds the title ‘evangelist’ at Semrush, cited the company’s data, which found 90% of people now use an LLM alongside a traditional search engine such as Google, while one in three searches carried out in ChatGPT uses SEO data.
That means AI search cannot be treated as a separate discipline from SEO, content, paid search and PR, with marketers instead needing to build a unified approach to search.
Nicky Briggs, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, described the challenge created by the shift from search engines to LLM “answer engines” as a “visibility vacuum”.
In 2024, there were two billion B2B searches taking place online every weekday, with 40% resulting in engagement through clicks, according to Forrester’s data. Today, search volumes have increased but engagement has fallen as buyers increasingly receive answers directly from AI rather than clicking through to websites.
Forrester has also predicted B2B web traffic could fall by between 50% and 75% over the following 12 to 18 months. However, traffic referred by LLMs is three to four times more likely to convert.
“Quantity down, quality up. Maybe this will balance out; maybe we’ll get away with it,” Briggs said. “But we’re not in the business of getting away with it. The fact remains that visibility has been cut in half.”
Understand what buyers are asking
Marketers should seek to understand what AI is searching for, rather than simply replicating traditional keyword strategies, Briggs advised.
When a buyer enters a prompt, AI can break it into multiple related searches, or “query fanouts”, potentially introducing brands and competitors that were not included in the original question.
“Your SEO team should not just be targeting specific keywords anymore. It’s starting to think about semantics,” Murphy said.
He argued that SEO teams should analyse these fanouts and share the information with analytics, content and paid search teams to understand what buyers are actually looking for and how the brand is appearing.
“One question in AI can actually impact multiple teams, and we just need to make sure that these teams are sharing information on a regular basis,” he said.
Alongside this, traditional search metrics such as rankings, clicks and referral traffic are less useful when AI can answer a buyer’s question without requiring them to visit a website.
“The other elephant in the room is that we are actually applying legacy metrics to what is a completely different new system,” Murphy said.
He added: “Number one position is no longer the goal, particularly when it comes to AI.”
The machine doesn’t respect org charts. The North Star is building an operating system.Gerald Murphy, Semrush
Instead, marketers need to understand whether their brand appears in an answer, where it appears, which competitors are mentioned and which sources are being cited.
Additionally, brands need to build authority beyond a brand’s own website. AI systems use multiple sources to construct answers, meaning marketers need to understand which third-party sites are being cited and how their brands are represented across the wider web.
“Don’t chase yesterday’s citation,” Murphy said. “We need to make sure that we’re optimising for relevant articles.”
He pointed to Reddit as one example of a platform B2B marketers should pay attention to, with the site increasingly prominent for searches around tool discovery, strategy research and agency and vendor research.
“Whenever you look at the trends of Google United States for Reddit in relation to B2B, it’s increasing massively. It now ranks for thousands of keywords in the number one position,” he explained.
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Briggs argued that brands should also look internally for sources of authority.
She said: “When we can identify the topics that they get passionate about that line up with what we need to be famous for, that’s when that authenticity comes through, and the content pretty much writes itself.”
Bring teams together
For Murphy, the changes ultimately require a more joined-up approach across marketing.
“Content, PR, community, and AI optimisation all play a part,” he said, arguing that AI could force businesses to adopt the “holistic search strategies” that marketers have been talking about for years.
“The machine doesn’t respect org charts,” Murphy said. “The North Star is building an operating system.”
As Murphy put it: “We need to make sure that both journeys are being looked at from the machine and the human.”