Buyers Don’t Search for Vendors.
They Ask AI to Recommend One.
A workshop on how AI changed buyer behavior and what it means for where your members spend their marketing dollars..
Workshop Overview
Your members are probably spending $5,000 to $15,000 a month on marketing. Their agencies are telling them the funnel is evolving and they need to optimize for AI visibility.
But the leads aren’t coming like they used to. The metrics look fine. The pipeline doesn’t.
The problem isn’t the marketing tactics. It’s that buyer behavior changed and most agencies haven’t caught up. There’s a gap between being visible to AI and being recommended by AI, and it’s the difference between getting a citation and getting the call.
Every agency in the market is focused on what AI knows about your brand. This workshop is focused on how your buyers are using AI to decide who to call.
The Shift: What Changed
For 15 years, agencies optimized for Google search. Keywords, rankings, blue links, inbound funnel. When AI entered the picture, agencies took the same playbook and applied it to AI. That’s AEO. Optimize for keywords, get cited on AI overview, hope the buyer clicks through to your website, signs up for emails, and follows the same inbound funnel. Same model, new channel.
But buyers aren’t using AI as a search engine. They’re using it as a research assistant.
Forrester, Gartner, and Bain are documenting that buyers are using AI to research and compare vendors during their purchase process. Think about what that actually means. If AI is delivering contextually relevant advice for a specific buyer’s situation, that’s not a keyword search. That’s a conversation. And in that conversation, AI generates its own search phrases, visits vendor websites, reads the text, and builds a custom shortlist.
Buyers don’t enter the inbound funnel anymore. During the research phase, they don’t visit your website. AI does.
What Happens in the Workshop
The workshop has three parts.
Part 1: The Shift. The research behind the shift and why the old playbook is breaking down. Your members understand what happened to their marketing and what it means for where they spend.
Part 2: Experience It. Your members build a real buyer prompt describing their best customer’s situation. They run it through AI live. They see who AI recommends, who it skips, and why. This is from the buyer’s perspective, not the marketer’s perspective. Most of them won’t show up.
Part 3: The Playbook. How AI actually evaluates vendors. The six questions AI needs answered. Which pages on their website matter and which ones AI skips. What they can control and what they can’t. A clear framework for evaluating whether their marketing is aimed at the right thing.
What Members Walk Away With
They see firsthand whether AI recommends their company when a buyer asks. They build their own buyer prompt and run it live. When most of them don’t show up and their competitors do, it stops being theoretical.
They understand why their marketing metrics look fine but pipeline doesn’t follow. Their agency is measuring visibility. They’ll understand why visibility alone isn’t converting to pipeline and what’s actually happening in the gap.
They know what AI actually looks for on their website and whether theirs answers those questions. Not a generic scorecard. They learn the specific questions AI asks when evaluating a vendor, and they can check their own website against those questions that week.
They have a clear starting point for their next conversation with their agency or marketing team. This isn’t about blaming their agency. It’s about asking better questions, starting with whether their agency understands the difference between optimizing for visibility and optimizing for recommendations.
Anyone who wants their own data can get a personal mini-audit after the session. They email their prompt, I run it through the audit, and we connect for a 30-minute call to walk through the results. The report is theirs to keep and share with their team.
Why This Matters Now
2026 has brought a lot of economic uncertainty. Most companies are being mindful of where they spend and are looking to do more with less. Marketing budgets are under scrutiny. And when the numbers aren’t there, marketing is usually the first line item that gets cut.
But cutting without understanding how buyer behavior actually changed is cutting blind. And doubling down on what your agency recommends without understanding the shift is spending blind. Both are decisions based on incomplete information.
This workshop isn’t about cutting or spending more. It’s about making informed decisions. There are three things your members need to understand to make those decisions well.
Meet buyers where they are. Most agencies are telling your members to put budget toward AI visibility because buyers are searching in AI. But buyers aren’t searching. They’re using AI as a research assistant to evaluate and compare vendors. Because it moves the analysis from days to hours. That’s the biggest efficiency gain in the buying process, and buyers are already taking advantage of it. Once your members understand how their buyers actually use AI, they can start making real decisions about where to allocate their marketing dollars.
Discovery has diversified. Inbound is no longer the reliable lead generation machine it was. But there are many ways buyers can find your members’ companies. Referrals, networking, events, trade shows, thought leadership, AI citations. AI visibility is one of them, not the only one. Which channels make sense is going to be different for every company. This workshop doesn’t tell your members which tactic to use. It gives them the framework to decide for themselves.
There’s an order of operations. No matter which discovery channels your members invest in, all of them flow into AI evaluation. A buyer gets a referral, then asks AI to research the company. A buyer sees a LinkedIn post, then asks AI to compare that company to alternatives. If the website doesn’t answer the questions AI asks during that evaluation, every discovery channel underperforms. Fix the website first. Then invest in discovery. That order matters, and most agencies aren’t talking about it because their revenue model depends on recurring work: content creation, blogging, AEO campaigns. That’s a retainer. Fixing your website to answer the questions AI asks is a one-time project with scheduled updates. That’s not a retainer.
Your members need to make informed decisions about marketing spend. This workshop gives them the understanding to do that.
If your members have already heard the AI visibility talk, this picks up where that leaves off. Visibility is about whether AI knows you exist. This is about whether AI recommends you when a buyer asks.
About David
I didn’t come from a marketing background. No degree in journalism, graphic design, writing, or any of the traditional marketing paths. My degree is in economics from UCLA. My MBA is from USC.
That matters because economics is the lens I use to look at marketing. Resource allocation, opportunity cost, where to deploy scarce capital for the highest return. That’s why this workshop is about informed decisions and order of operations, not about the latest marketing tactic.
I owned a HubSpot growth agency and saw the inbound model break firsthand. Before that, 25 years in corporate America: investment banking, IT consulting, Toyota Motor Sales, and Deloitte Consulting.
I built the AI Shortlist Audit from the ground up. The research is grounded in what tier-1 firms like Forrester, Gartner, and Bain are documenting at the enterprise level. What the audit does is make that actionable for small and mid-market companies, so your members can take advantage of these shifts before they trickle down through the agency ecosystem.
I should be transparent about something. I make my living doing a full version of this audit for companies. It’s a two-week diagnostic. It costs $10,000.
I’m not going to pretend the workshop has nothing to do with my business. But here’s what matters for your group.
The workshop delivers real value whether or not anyone ever talks to me again. The experience of seeing AI process a buyer prompt, the framework for evaluating whether their website answers the questions AI asks, the search engine vs. research assistant distinction. That’s theirs to keep and act on.
I only do diagnosis. I don’t sell implementation. I don’t have a retainer to protect. Your members get an honest read, not a pitch.
When members ask “who do I hire to fix this?” the answer is often their existing agency, once they know the right questions to ask. If they need a content writer or web developer, I can provide referrals. I don’t accept commissions or referral fees.
Let’s Talk: David@dowhat.works