Get ready to be quoted by answer engines
Half of B2B software buyers now start their research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google (G2, March 2026, 1,076 buyers, self-reported). An answer read there often sends no click.
Evidence
Removed from this step
These statements were here until a source did not support them.
It said: 30 to 50% of tool research happens in an assistant that never sends a click.
We found: No study. The nearest figure is a G2 survey: about half of B2B software buyers start research in a chatbot more often than in Google.
Now: The G2 survey figure, labelled self-reported.
Inside this
- Publish llms.txt30m
A plain-text map of what you are and which pages state it. Half an hour, then move on: Google says AI Overviews need no AI text file, so it is cheap insurance for the agents and tools that do ask for one, not a ranking lever.
- Put a plain “what this is” paragraph in the first 100 words30m
Extraction reads the top of the page. Poetry above the definition costs you the citation.
- Record your AI-citation baseline30m
Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AIO “best [your category] tools”. Log the answer verbatim.
- Confirm the AI search crawlers can actually fetch you, in the logs20m
Look for the crawlers that decide citations — OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Applebot — not GPTBot or ClaudeBot, which gather training data and say nothing about whether an answer can quote you. Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default now, so a site can be invisible without anyone choosing it.
- Check that Brave has your key pages, and ask it to re-fetch the missing ones15m
Brave’s index is what Claude’s web search reads. There is no console and no Brave user agent: it crawls only what your robots.txt lets Googlebot crawl. Its submit form re-fetches a page; it does not promise to index a site it has never seen.
- Serve a Markdown version of each content page to agents that ask for it1h
An agent that asks for Markdown gets the page without menus, scripts or popups, so it reads what you wrote rather than your layout. The same words as the HTML, never extra ones: a version only machines can see is cloaking.