B2B marketers, what is AI telling buyers about your business?

By Julia Filsell-Chapman, Head of Digital

When a procurement manager asks ChatGPT to recommend compliance software, or a financial services buyer asks Claude to compare business expense platforms, the AI doesn’t just invent an answer. It pulls from many sources – increasingly, those sources aren’t brand websites. In fact, earned media accounts for 82% of links cited by AI models (MuckRack, Dec 2025)

These can be carefully crafted thought leadership pieces, but they’re also Reddit threads, LinkedIn articles, YouTube videos, and review platforms – places where your brand reputation is being formed, referenced, and cited by Large Language Models (LLMs), often without your knowledge or input.

For B2B businesses, this matters. A lot. Here are five things you need to know.

AI answers are built on sources you probably aren’t monitoring

LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity don’t generate answers from thin air. They retrieve and cite external sources – and the platforms they most regularly pull from might surprise you.

Analysis in 2025 highlighted the dominance of Reddit and Wikipedia, but the citation landscape shifts regularly, and with each platform. While YouTube leads for Google Gemini, ChatGPT prefers “community truth,” with LinkedIn, Reddit, and Wikipedia collectively being cited in over 25% of responses. LinkedIn has solidified its position as a top-five domain for professional queries, while strategic licensing deals have seen titles like The Guardian appear in as many as 58% of ChatGPT’s responses

If your brand’s presence on these platforms and publications is thin, outdated, or negative, that’s what AI is working with when your buyers come asking.

Earned media is worth its weight in gold

LLMs might cite brand website content that you’ve carefully crafted, but earned media holds much more credibility. That 82% stat from MuckRack isn’t a blip – we’ve seen this play out over and over again. It mirrors how we evaluate trust as humans: a recommendation from an independent source carries more weight than the brand saying it about itself.

This means press coverage (and press releases) thought leadership, industry awards, and appearances in trade publications aren’t just reputation-builders in the traditional sense – they’re feeding the pool that AI draws from when constructing answers about your category. A mention in a credible sector publication, a quote in an industry report, or a listing in a respected directory all contribute to the body of independent evidence that makes an LLM more likely to surface your brand confidently.

For B2B businesses, this is where PR and GEO strategy intersect directly. Earned coverage in the right publications isn’t just building awareness – it’s building AI visibility. The two are now the same discipline.

Reddit is shaping buyer perception — even in B2B

It’s tempting to dismiss Reddit as a consumer platform, but LLMs don’t draw that distinction. When someone asks an AI tool to compare enterprise software vendors or assess a professional services firm, Reddit threads with genuine user opinions regularly appear in the cited sources – and yes, these kinds of discussions are happening on Reddit, alongside video game chats and memes.

There is nuance to this: LLMs aren’t chasing viral posts. SEMrush research found that up to 80% of Reddit threads cited by AI have fewer than 20 upvotes, and the average age of a cited thread is roughly 900 days (Search Engine Land, March 2026). AI systems are surfacing established thinking, not yesterday’s trending post. That means a two-year-old thread where an ex-employee criticised your onboarding process could be quietly influencing what AI tells your prospects today.

LinkedIn is a top AI citation source for B2B

B2B marketers know what an important tool LinkedIn can be and LLM search has made that even more true. A Semrush study of 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity found that LinkedIn appeared in roughly 11% of all AI responses – outperforming most established media outlets (Semrush, March 2026). Hubspot is a great example of a B2B brand that has absolutely nailed its content strategy, especially when it comes to LinkedIn.

Critically, 59% of cited LinkedIn content came from individual members rather than company pages, on ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. AI systems are weighting human-authored, expert-attributed content above generic brand-authored content.

This means your executives’ and subject matter experts’ LinkedIn activity isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s directly feeding the AI answers your buyers are reading. Original articles, practical insights, and content tied to named experts with clear credentials are what gets cited.

You can’t manage what you aren’t tracking

The most common problem isn’t that B2B brands have a terrible reputation across these platforms. It’s that they have no visibility into what AI is saying about them at all.

Research from eMarketer found that US enterprises dedicated an average of 12% of digital marketing budgets to generative engine optimisation (GEO) in 2025, with 94% planning to increase that spend in 2026 (CMSWire, April 2026). Yet most businesses still aren’t systematically monitoring how they appear in AI-generated answers.

Start simple: query the AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) with the same queries your buyers have – “Who are the leading providers of X?”, “Compare service A and service B” – and see whether you appear, how you’re described, and what sources are being cited. You might be pleasantly surprised. You might not. Either way, you’ll know.

What to do next

Managing your brand’s reputation across these platforms isn’t about trying to trick the system. It’s about ensuring the information that exists about your business – on Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, review sites and earned media – is accurate, current, and reflective of the value you deliver.

That means auditing your presence, identifying gaps, creating expert-led content that AI can find and cite, and continually monitoring the LLM outputs.

If you’d like help assessing your AI visibility and building a plan to manage your brand’s reputation, get in touch with us. We work with B2B businesses across manufacturing, financial services, and professional services to turn GEO insight into action – using both tools and our earned media expertise to track and improve how brands show up in AI-generated answers.