The Problems I Diagnose for B2B Companies

  • I diagnose why B2B marketing is not producing the leads it used to.

  • The problems differ from owner to owner. The root cause is more buyers outsourcing the research to AI.

  • Solving these problems means adapting to AI-mediated shortlisting.

Your Traffic Is Down, Your Leads Are Down, and You Do Not Know Why

Website traffic is down from last year, and the number of leads came down with it. The leads that do arrive are good ones, and there are not enough of them. You are running the same campaigns, through the same channels, on the same budget, with the same agency.

Your agency's explanation was reasonable: AI Overviews answer the question at the top of the page, so people never leave Google. You acted on it, and the traffic has not come back.

Why: inbound marketing depends on buyers starting with a Google search and visiting your website to do the research, and AI lets more buyers get answers without visiting it.

Your AEO, GEO, or AI Visibility Reports Look Good, but You Are Not Seeing the Leads

The advice was to go where the eyeballs are: stop optimizing for blue links and start optimizing for citations. The work got done. FAQ blocks went in across the site, an llms.txt file was published, and a page was added that tells AI how to describe the company. The monthly report shows a visibility score, share of voice, and mentions, and every one of them is up.

The number of leads has not moved.

Why: a mention names you as a possible vendor. A recommendation says why you fit what the buyer needs. If AI mentions you but cannot say why you are a fit, visibility does not turn into pipeline.

You Got a Proposal From a Marketing Agency and Want an Independent Second Opinion

To fix your lead generation problem, you have been quoted AI visibility work, a website redesign, or a bigger SEO and AEO retainer. Some of it arrived after a free or low cost AI audit.

You are concerned that the audit was a sales tactic, because it came from the company that sells the fix. But the proposal is real: it has a timeline, activities, deliverables, and a cost.

Before you commit to a large annual expense, you want an independent second opinion.

Why a second opinion: the diagnosis came from the vendor selling the work. I am paid for the diagnosis, not to implement the fix. The second opinion is the AI Shortlist Audit: my own diagnosis of why AI recommends you, or does not.

You Do Not Know If Your Marketing Budget Is Going to the Right Tactics

You rely on your marketing agency to know best how to allocate your marketing budget: some to ads, some to content marketing, some to SEO, some to the new AI visibility line.

What comes back every month is a report of marketing metrics, the activities they did and the work that got done: posts published, campaigns launched, keywords ranked, share of voice gained. You approve the next quarter, and the same allocation carries forward for another year.

Why: except for paid ads, where you can see the conversions, these are visibility metrics. Getting on the shortlist and being recommended is not visibility. Finding vendors and building the shortlist are two different jobs, which is how you can keep spending and not see the leads.

Where to Go Next