Last month, I asked a VP of marketing how potential customers were discovering her company. “Organic search, some paid, a bit of social,” she replied. I opened ChatGPT and typed in a query her ideal buyer might use: “Best customer data platforms for healthcare SaaS teams with small RevOps staff.” Her company never appeared. That absence matters more than any single lost ranking. She wasn’t showing up in the AI-generated summaries buyers increasingly rely on. Buyer journeys now begin with a conversation that compresses the market and shapes the final shortlist. Below is how that shift is transforming discovery, what visibility inside LLMs really means, which KPIs signal early danger, and how to get your team ready for the next 18 months.
Discovery is now a conversation, not a search box
Many prospects now describe their pain directly to an AI system and expect clear, synthesized advice. In one prompt, they’ll include constraints, budget, compliance requirements, team size, and urgency. The system responds with distilled recommendations and guidance on how to evaluate them. Your brand is either part of that narrative or absent from the critical buying moment.
Buyers are outsourcing research to a single interface and want a coherent story that defines the problem and surfaces trustworthy options. Prompts now look like:
What platforms help mid-market SaaS teams manage compliance training with limited staff?
Which CDPs are effective for healthcare brands with small engineering teams?
These questions carry nuance that traditional keyword tools rarely capture. A SERP-first mindset loses importance when the buyer never reaches a results page. Content created only to rank—without clarifying the problem, context, or trade-offs—rarely…