AI Experience Optimization: Is Your B2B Marketing Ready for What's Next?

For 20 years, B2B marketers built systems to bring buyers to them. Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, on why that model is changing and what replaces it.

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Quick summary: AI experience optimization, or AXO, is the next frontier for B2B marketers. Buyers are using ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to research and shortlist vendors before visiting any website. This article explains why getting cited in AI search is only half the battle, and what CMOs need to do to convert that traffic into revenue.

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Eighty to ninety percent of what you know about marketing is still true. You still need great positioning, brand, good content, and to understand your buyer. But one thing is changing completely, and it changes everything else.

For two decades, B2B marketing has operated around a single organizing principle: Bring the buyer in. Build the website. Run the search campaigns. Create the funnel. Drive traffic. Capture leads. Nurture them down the pipe. Hand them to sales.

That model is ending, and according to Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, AI experience optimization is the framework emerging to replace it.

"We need to change our marketing mindset," Pedowitz told a room of senior B2B CMOs at a recent CMO Huddles Strategy Lab. "To not be focused on them coming to us. We have to be where they are."

The force driving this shift is AI. Specifically, buyers are now using large language models to research, evaluate, and in some cases complete purchases without ever visiting a vendor's website. According to Pedowitz, AI experience optimization (AXO) is the framework emerging to close that gap.

The Numbers Behind the Shift in B2B AI Search

The broader market data is stark. Fifty to sixty percent of all search now goes through an LLM before reaching Google. Buyers who start a traditional Google search increasingly encounter an AI-generated summary before they see any organic results. The AI is in front of the link.

Gartner and other research firms project that 60 to 80 percent of current website traffic will disappear within the next three to five years. Not because websites stop mattering, but because buyers will get what they need from an LLM conversation rather than a site visit.

But here is what makes those numbers actionable: Across The Pedowitz Group's client base, LLM-sourced visitors convert at 4.4 to 4.5 times the rate of any other channel. Time on page runs three to three and a half minutes, compared to significantly less for standard traffic. By the time they reach your page, they are close to a decision.

4.4x higher conversion rate for LLM-sourced traffic vs. any other channel.

A smaller volume of traffic converting at 4-5x is not a consolation prize for lost organic search volume; it's a fundamentally different and more valuable buyer signal. Most B2B marketing teams are not yet tracking it, let alone optimizing for it.

AEO for B2B Marketers: Necessary, But Not Enough

Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the practice of structuring content so that AI tools cite your brand when buyers ask relevant questions. Getting cited, showing up in AI responses, and building trust with LLMs all matter.

But citation is only part of the problem. That's why The Pedowitz Group coined a different term for the full challenge: AXO, or AI experience optimization.

The X is deliberate, standing for "experience." The question is not just whether AI finds you and cites you. Instead, it's whether the experience a buyer encounters after clicking actually moves them toward a decision.

Across the companies Pedowitz has analyzed, the answer is often no. His platform evaluates B2B websites across three dimensions:

1. First, are you showing up in LLM results?
2. Second, does your content cover buyer problems in the language buyers actually use, across all stages of the buying journey?
3. Third, is there a clear, AI-accessible path from citation to conversion?

Almost universally, companies score reasonably well on the first dimension and poorly on the second and third. They're getting found but not converting. They're building content, but not in the way buyers search for it. Their conversion tools are buried behind forms, locked in PDFs, or invisible to the AI crawlers.

Pedowitz argues that getting cited is great, but if it doesn't connect to revenue, it doesn't matter.

How LLM Personalization Complicates B2B Content Strategy

There is one challenge specific to LLMs that has no equivalent in traditional SEO: Every user gets a different answer.

LLMs behave like a Netflix recommendation engine or a personalized news feed. They learn from each user's interaction history, role, context, and preferences. As a result, the same prompt entered by 10 different members of a B2B buying committee will return 10 different responses. Some users will get your brand cited prominently. Others may not see you at all.

For B2B marketers already managing content for large buying committees, this adds a significant new layer of complexity. Optimizing for one query is not enough. Instead, the content strategy must account for the range of questions different personas will ask and the different answers they'll receive.

What AXO Requires: Two Things Most B2B Marketers Aren't Doing

1. Cover buyer problems in buyer language

This is where almost every company Pedowitz analyzed scored poorly. The issue is not volume of content, it's whether your content covers the full buyer journey in the words buyers actually use, not your marketing language.

Buyers do not search for your category name or your methodology, they search for their problem. And the way they describe that problem in an LLM conversation is often nothing like the language on your website.

Pedowitz’s recommendation: Go to whatever LLM you use, enter your URL, and ask it to generate the questions a buyer would ask about your space from the unaware stage to the deciding stage. Ask it to answer in plain English, and from the buyer’s point of view, not yours. The gap between those questions and what your site actually answers is your AXO problem coverage gap. That's where you start.

2. Make your conversion tools visible to AI engines

You may already have the right assets: ROI calculators, assessments, case studies, competitive comparisons. The AXO question is whether AI engines can actually find them.

If your best content is gated behind a form, AI crawlers can't read it. When your case studies live in PDFs, AI crawlers can't cite them. And if your decision-stage tools are buried three clicks deep in a resource center, they are invisible to the LLM.

Pedowitz’s firm built 10,000 pages to stress-test this so you don't have to. What they learned is that one to three well-built topic clusters, or roughly 100 to 300 pages organized around a focused subject area, is enough to generate meaningful citation and conversion lift for most B2B companies. Results can show up within days of publishing.

The fix is straightforward: Get your most valuable content into open web pages, structured so AI engines can find, read, and cite it.

Where B2B Buyers Are Actually Talking

One of the more counterintuitive findings from Pedowitz's research concerns where LLMs draw their information from. Specifically, Reddit and Quora rank far above LinkedIn and gated industry platforms as AI source material.

The reason is straightforward. Reddit and Quora are ungated, so AI engines can read and index them freely. Moreover, they contain the kind of unfiltered, natural-language conversation that LLMs treat as a high-quality signal.

LinkedIn, by contrast, is heavily gated. Even with Microsoft's deep integration with OpenAI, LinkedIn content is largely inaccessible to external LLM crawlers. Therefore, the platform where most B2B marketers spend the majority of their social energy is, from an AI experience optimization perspective, one of the least valuable channels for LLM visibility at this time.

The implication here is not to abandon LinkedIn, but to invest meaningfully in ungated communities where authentic conversation happens. Monitor relevant subreddits. Engage with actual posts. Note the language buyers use when describing the problems your product solves, and bring that language back into your content.

One final word of warning: Do not use AI to respond in these forums. It will be detected, and it will damage your brand's credibility.

The Funnel Was Never For The Buyer

At the Strategy Labs, Pedowitz made a point about the marketing funnel that is uncomfortable but hard to argue with:

"The funnel has nothing to do with our customer," he says. "It's an artificial construct that we use so that we can have something predictable to run our business."

Buyers do not experience a funnel. Instead, they experience a research process they control, at their own pace, through their own channels, increasingly without ever signaling to a vendor that it's happening. By the time they surface, they may have completed the equivalent of the entire top and middle of a traditional marketing funnel, inside an LLM, without touching a form or generating an MQL.

One CMO at the Strategy Labs put a name to the buyer that emerges from this process: An AQL, or AI Qualified Lead. This is someone who has already had the research conversation, evaluated options, and arrived with a specific question or intent. The AQL does not need nurturing. They need to be met where they are.

"If someone can get all their information from an LLM session and then make a buying decision, that's what we're trying to enable. That's the self-guided selling experience." — Jeff Pedowitz, The Pedowitz Group

What AXO Means for B2B CMOs

The implications for how marketing teams are structured, measured, and resourced are significant. Pedowitz describes a shift away from functional departments toward what he calls an amoeba model: Fluid groups that come together around an outcome and dissolve when the work is done, rather than fixed teams organized by discipline.

More immediately, AI experience optimization requires rethinking what website traffic means, what forms are for, what PDFs cost you, and what it actually looks like to enable a buyer to reach a decision without a sales touch.

None of this requires abandoning what works. Brand, positioning, and good content still matter; the difference is the direction. Rather than building systems to bring buyers to you, the work now is to be present wherever buyers are looking, including inside the LLM conversations they're having before you know they exist.

The CMOs getting ahead of this are not waiting for the traffic drop to become undeniable. They are building the content, the structure, and the experience now, while the early-mover advantage is still on the table.

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Jeff Pedowitz is President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, a revenue marketing agency. You can check out their AXO reports and request an analysis of your own company at thepedowitzgroup.com. He facilitated multiple CMO Huddles Strategy Labs in 2026.

Want more?

• For a deeper dive into how B2B buyers are using Reddit and why it matters for AI search, read: Reddit Is Now the #1 B2B Marketing Channel. Most CMOs Are Ignoring It.

• CMO Huddles brings together senior B2B marketing leaders for candid, peer-to-peer conversations on the challenges that matter most. Learn more.

FAQs About AI Experience Optimization for B2B Marketers