B2B Buying in the LLM Era Has Changed. Your GTM Strategy Hasn’t.

B2B decision-makers are increasingly turning to large language models before they ever visit your website, read your case studies, or speak to a salesperson. The research phase has shifted, quietly and quickly, and most go-to-market strategies were built for a world where buyers came to you first.

That shift changes what visibility means, what content needs to do, and where influence actually gets built. If your GTM motion still treats search rankings and gated whitepapers as the primary levers, you are optimising for a buyer experience that a growing share of your audience has already moved past.

What Has Actually Changed About B2B Buying?

B2B buying has always been slow, committee-driven, and politically complicated. None of that has changed. What has changed is where individual stakeholders go to form their initial views before the committee process even begins.

For years, the dominant model was: buyer has a problem, buyer searches Google, buyer finds vendor content, vendor captures lead. The funnel was linear enough that you could build a GTM motion around it. Invest in SEO, produce thought leadership, gate your best assets, nurture the lead. It was never perfect, but it was legible.

LLMs have inserted themselves into the earliest part of that experience. A CFO trying to understand whether their payments infrastructure needs replacing is not necessarily starting with a Google search anymore. They might be asking ChatGPT or Perplexity to give them a structured overview of the problem space, the vendor categories, and the trade-offs. By the time they arrive at your website, they may already have a mental model of the market that you had no hand in shaping.

That is the shift worth taking seriously. Not the technology itself, but what it means for where and how influence gets built.

This connects to something I have been writing about across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub: the mechanics of how buyers move through markets are changing faster than most GTM strategies are being updated. The frameworks that made sense three years ago need pressure-testing against the reality of how buyers actually behave today.

Why Most GTM Strategies Are Still Built for the Old Research Moment

Earlier in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel performance. It felt clean and accountable. You could see the click, the lead, the conversion. What took me longer to appreciate was that much of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The buyer had already decided, or was already close to deciding, before your ad appeared. You captured the intent. You did not create it.

The LLM era makes that distinction more consequential, not less. If a buyer’s initial framing of a problem, their understanding of the solution categories, and their implicit shortlist are all shaped before they reach your paid or organic channels, then optimising those channels harder does not solve the upstream problem. You are fishing in a pool that someone else stocked.

Most B2B GTM strategies I see are still built around the assumption that the buyer’s research experience begins somewhere you can intercept. That assumption is worth challenging. GTM has been getting harder for a while, and the LLM layer is accelerating that trend rather than creating it from scratch.

The practical implication is that your content strategy, your positioning, and your brand presence need to be doing work much earlier in the buyer’s thinking than your funnel metrics suggest. If you are only measuring what you can attribute, you are missing the part of the experience that matters most.

How LLMs Actually Shape B2B Purchase Decisions

It is worth being precise about the mechanism here, because the hype around LLMs in marketing tends toward the dramatic. The reality is more structural and less spectacular.

When a B2B buyer uses an LLM to research a problem, they are typically doing one of a few things: getting a structured overview of a problem space they do not fully understand yet, generating a framework for evaluating vendors or solutions, or pressure-testing a view they already hold. In each case, the LLM is drawing on content that already exists in its training data or, in the case of retrieval-augmented systems like Perplexity, content it can access in real time.

That means the brands and voices that appear credible and authoritative in the LLM’s output are, by and large, the ones that have published credible and authoritative content over time. There is no shortcut here that does not involve actually being good at explaining things clearly and consistently.

What LLMs do change is the compression of the early research phase. A buyer who might have spent two hours reading vendor blogs and analyst reports can now get a structured synthesis in ten minutes. That is not bad for buyers. It does mean that the window in which your content can shape a buyer’s thinking is narrower, and the bar for being included in that synthesis is higher.

I have spent time doing digital marketing due diligence across a range of businesses, and one pattern that keeps appearing is the gap between how much content a company produces and how much genuine authority it actually builds. Volume without depth does not get you into an LLM’s synthesis. It barely gets you into a human buyer’s consideration set.

The Buying Committee Has Not Disappeared. It Has Got More Informed.

One thing worth pushing back on is the idea that LLMs are fundamentally changing the structure of B2B buying decisions. They are not. The buying committee is still there. The internal politics are still there. The procurement process is still there. What has changed is that individual members of that committee can now arrive at meetings with a more formed view, faster.

That can cut both ways. A well-informed champion who has used an LLM to build a clear business case for your solution is a more effective internal advocate. A sceptical stakeholder who has used an LLM to surface objections to your category is a harder obstacle to manage. The information asymmetry that salespeople used to rely on has largely gone.

This has implications for how sales and marketing need to work together. If buyers are arriving more informed, the early-stage sales conversation needs to operate at a higher level of sophistication. The “education” function that sales used to own is increasingly happening before any human interaction takes place.

I have seen this play out in sectors where the buying process is already complex and relationship-driven. In B2B financial services marketing, for example, the technical sophistication of buyers has always been high. What LLMs are doing is extending that sophistication to stakeholders who previously relied on the vendor to educate them. The CFO who once deferred to the CTO on infrastructure questions now has access to a reasonably coherent summary of the trade-offs before the meeting starts.

What “Being Visible” Means When Buyers Use LLMs

The question I get asked most often about LLMs in a B2B context is some version of: how do we make sure we show up? It is a reasonable question, but it often comes from the same instinct that drives obsessive SEO optimisation: the idea that visibility is primarily a technical problem with a technical solution.

It is not. Or at least, not primarily.

LLMs surface brands and perspectives that have built genuine authority in a domain. That authority is built through consistent, high-quality publishing over time, through being cited by other credible sources, and through having a clear and defensible point of view that is distinct from the generic consensus. None of that is new. It is the same thing that made some brands authoritative in search, in analyst reports, and in trade press.

What has changed is the surface area. An LLM drawing on training data or real-time retrieval is not just looking at your website. It is looking at everything you have published, everywhere you have been cited, and the overall coherence of your positioning across channels. A fragmented content strategy that says different things in different places is more exposed in this environment than it was when buyers were only likely to encounter one or two touchpoints.

This is a good moment to run a proper audit of how your brand presents across its digital footprint. The checklist for analysing your company website for sales and marketing strategy is a useful starting point, though the scope of the audit needs to extend beyond the website itself in this context.

The brands that will be surfaced positively by LLMs are the ones that have been doing the unglamorous work of building genuine expertise in public. That means publishing things that are actually useful, taking positions that are actually defensible, and being consistent enough that the overall picture is coherent. Market penetration in the modern sense is as much about mental availability as it is about channel reach.

The Demand Generation Problem Gets Harder Before It Gets Easier

I want to be honest about something: the LLM era does not make demand generation easier. It makes the gap between brands that have invested in genuine authority and brands that have not more visible and more consequential.

Think about what demand generation is actually trying to do. It is trying to reach buyers who are not yet in market and shape how they think about a problem space so that when they do enter the market, your brand is part of their mental shortlist. That is a long-horizon, brand-building activity, even when it is dressed up in performance marketing language.

The analogy I keep coming back to is a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who just walks past. The act of engagement, of actually experiencing the product, changes the probability of purchase in a way that no amount of window display optimisation can replicate. In B2B, the equivalent is getting a buyer to genuinely engage with your thinking before they are in market. LLMs are now a layer through which that engagement either happens or does not, depending on whether your content is good enough to be drawn upon.

Tactics like pay per appointment lead generation still have a role, particularly for capturing buyers who are already in market. But they are not a substitute for the upstream work of shaping how buyers think about the problem space. In the LLM era, that upstream work has become more important, not less, because the compression of the research phase means the window for late-stage influence has narrowed.

Channel Strategy in a World Where Research Happens Off-Platform

One of the practical consequences of the LLM research layer is that some of the traditional signals B2B marketers use to understand buyer behaviour become less reliable. If a buyer is doing their initial research in ChatGPT and only arriving at your website once they have a formed view, your first-touch attribution data tells you very little about how they actually got there.

This is not a new problem. Dark social, word of mouth, and offline influence have always created attribution gaps. But the LLM layer is systematic and growing, which means the gap between what your analytics show and what is actually happening is likely to widen.

The response is not to try to measure the unmeasurable. It is to be honest about what your measurement tells you and what it does not, and to make decisions accordingly. I have written before about how analytics tools are a perspective on reality, not reality itself. That perspective is becoming narrower as more of the buyer experience moves to surfaces you cannot track.

What this means practically is that channel strategy needs to account for influence that does not show up in your attribution model. Channels that build brand presence and authority, including endemic advertising in the publications your buyers actually read, earned media, and consistent thought leadership publishing, become more important precisely because they are doing work that your performance channels cannot.

The BCG research on B2B go-to-market strategy has long pointed to the importance of understanding where influence actually operates in complex buying processes, and that principle applies here. The channel mix that made sense when buyers started their experience on Google needs revisiting when a growing share of them are starting it in an LLM.

What Good GTM Strategy Looks Like in This Environment

I spent a week early in my agency career at Cybercom, and on my first day in a brainstorm the founder had to leave for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But the thing about being handed the pen is that you either use it or you do not. The brands that will do well in the LLM era are the ones that pick up the pen rather than waiting for the environment to stabilise.

Concretely, that means a few things.

First, your positioning needs to be clear and specific enough to be citable. Vague positioning does not survive the compression that LLMs apply to market categories. If you cannot articulate in one or two sentences what you do, for whom, and why it matters, an LLM will not articulate it for you either.

Second, your content needs to have genuine depth. The era of thin content optimised for keyword density is over, and has been for a while. But the LLM layer makes depth more valuable because the synthesis an LLM produces tends to draw on sources that have actually said something substantive. Publishing more is not the answer. Publishing better is.

Third, your GTM motion needs to account for the full arc of the buyer experience, including the part that happens before any of your channels are involved. That means investing in brand and authority-building activities that do not produce clean attribution data, and being comfortable with that ambiguity.

For B2B tech companies in particular, the tension between corporate brand and business unit marketing becomes more acute in this environment. The corporate and business unit marketing framework for B2B tech companies is worth revisiting with this lens: if buyers are forming views about your company as a whole before they engage with specific product lines, the coherence of your overall brand narrative matters more than it did when buyers were handling product-specific landing pages.

Fourth, sales enablement needs to catch up with the reality that buyers are arriving more informed. That is not a threat to sales. It is an opportunity to have better conversations earlier. But it requires that sales teams are equipped to engage at the level of sophistication that informed buyers bring to the table.

The growth hacking instinct, to find the fastest path to a result, is understandable but increasingly insufficient. Growth tools and tactics still have their place, but they operate downstream of the positioning and authority work that the LLM era makes more foundational. The brands that treat that foundational work as optional will find it harder to compete as the LLM research layer becomes more embedded in how buyers operate.

There is more on these themes across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, including frameworks for thinking about how growth strategy needs to adapt as buyer behaviour shifts.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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