Something has changed in how my clients' buyers start their research. Increasingly the first step isn't a search box — it's a chat window, asking an assistant which tools solve a particular problem and what the trade-offs are. The assistant produces a shortlist. If you're not on it, you're not in the evaluation, and unlike page two of Google there's no scrolling further to find you.
Why this is different from ranking
Search returns ten options and lets the user choose. An assistant returns three and explains why. That compression is the whole story: the long tail of 'good enough' results that used to receive some traffic now receives none. It also means the assistant is making an editorial judgement about your product based on whatever it has read about you — including sources you don't control and can't correct.
What appears to influence inclusion
Nobody outside the labs knows the mechanics, so treat all confident advice on this — including mine — as inference from observation. What I can say from testing across client categories is that the shortlists correlate with breadth of independent mention rather than with your own site's rankings. Being described consistently across many third-party sources appears to matter more than anything you publish yourself.
- Third-party coverage: review sites, directories, comparison articles, forum threads
- Consistent category language — describe yourself the way buyers phrase the problem
- Clear, specific, quotable claims about who you're for and what you replace
- Presence in the places practitioners actually discuss the category
Audit your own shortlist position
This takes an hour and every B2B marketer should have done it. Write down the ten questions a buyer would realistically ask about your category. Ask each of them across the major assistants. Record whether you appear, what they say about you, and who appears alongside you. The results are frequently uncomfortable — wrong pricing, outdated positioning, or a competitor described as the obvious choice. You can't fix what you haven't looked at.
Don't rebuild your strategy around this yet
It's early, the behaviour is changing quickly, and there's a growing industry selling optimisation services for a mechanism nobody has documented. The sensible posture is to treat it as an additional visibility surface to monitor quarterly, not as a replacement for the fundamentals. The things that appear to help — genuine third-party presence, clear positioning, being talked about by real practitioners — are the things that were worth doing anyway.
Being absent from the answer is the new version of being on page two, with one difference: there's no page two to be on.
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