• AI visibility

Guide · AI search

How do marketing software companies win buyers who ask AI first?

By earning a place in the answers marketing leaders get when they ask an AI assistant to map a category, then meeting those buyers with the pricing, demos and proof they expect. Marketing leaders are among the earliest adopters of AI at work, and in 2026 most of them start their software searches there. The channel is real and moving fast; what nobody has yet measured is how much closed revenue it causes.

By Underneath Team Guide Updated

The short version

  1. In Wynter’s (opens in a new tab) January 2026 survey of 101 CMOs at B2B software companies, 84% used AI tools to discover vendors, up from 24% a year earlier, and 68% started their search there before Google. Only 9% started by googling a software category.
  2. The shortlist is tiny and decided early: 62% of those CMOs evaluate exactly three vendors, and 48% arrive at the first sales call very familiar with the vendor, up from 22%.
  3. The category is crowded. Chiefmartec’s 2025 landscape (opens in a new tab) counted 15,384 marketing technology products in 49 categories, so an AI answer that names three of them is doing a lot of filtering.
  4. Marketing software vendors report the channel converting: at Ahrefs (opens in a new tab), 0.5% of traffic came from AI search but produced 12.1% of signups, and HubSpot (opens in a new tab) told investors that just 10% of its leads now come from blog traffic.
  5. A won customer is worth years of revenue: HubSpot (opens in a new tab) averaged $11,683 in subscription revenue per customer in late 2025, and Klaviyo reported net revenue retention of 110%.

Who signs off on marketing technology, and how much is one customer worth?

The CMO leads strategic platform purchases, a committee of about five signs off, and a won account usually grows.

Wynter found the average buying committee in a marketing purchase now has 5.1 members: the CMO, finance, IT and security, revenue operations and the people who will use the tool. CMOs lead the research themselves for strategic platforms such as CRM and marketing automation, while their teams choose point tools. One CMO in the survey put it plainly: “If it touches revenue strategy or brand reputation, I’m doing the research myself.”

Those buyers work with tight budgets. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey (opens in a new tab) of 402 marketing leaders found budgets flat at 7.7% of company revenue, and most CMOs said they had too little budget to carry out their strategy. A new tool usually has to replace or consolidate an old one, which is why HubSpot’s results talk about customers who “consolidate tech stacks.”

What a customer is worth depends on the category, but public filings give a range. HubSpot ended 2025 with 288,706 customers. Klaviyo, the email and text messaging platform, had over 193,000 customers, of which 3,912 generated more than $50,000 a year in recurring revenue. Semrush reported that its customers paying over $50,000 a year grew by over 72% in a year. Because these are subscriptions that expand, a buyer first met in an AI answer can be worth several years of renewals and add-ons, not one sale.

Which questions do marketing leaders ask AI about software?

Category maps, stack fit, alternatives, attribution and price, usually with their own constraints attached.

These sample prompts are ours, written to mirror how a CMO or marketing ops lead might ask about different martech categories; they are not logged queries:

  • Marketing automation: “Best marketing automation platform for a small B2B team already on Salesforce.”
  • Email and messaging: “Which email marketing platform is best for a mid-size Shopify store?”
  • Attribution and analytics: “How do Dreamdata and HockeyStack compare for multi-touch attribution with a long sales cycle?”
  • SEO and AI visibility: “What tools track whether my brand appears in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews?”
  • Personalization and testing: “Alternatives to Optimizely for website personalization that do not need a developer.”
  • Campaign management: “What do mid-market teams use to plan campaigns across paid, email and events in one place?”

Small changes in the constraint change the answer. In our prompt phrasing study, Perplexity named Klaviyo every time it was asked which email marketing platform is best for ecommerce, and never once when the same question added a tight budget; MailerLite moved the other way. Across all the brands we tracked that were named in three or more answers, 88.6% had a visibility that differed by 40 points or more between their best and worst wording. A marketing software company should know which version of its buyers’ question it wins and which it loses.

How does an AI answer turn into pipeline for a marketing software company?

Through a three-vendor shortlist, then a trial or demo that confirms a decision already half made.

The shortlist. Wynter found 62% of CMOs evaluate exactly three vendors. In Gartner Digital Markets’ data, buyers start with an average of 4.4 options on their initial list, and 81% of buyers end up purchasing from that initial list most or all of the time. If the assistant leaves you off when the list is drawn, there are few later chances.

The trial or demo. Marketing buyers want to see the product before they talk to anyone. Wynter found 58% try an interactive demo before talking to sales, up from 46%, and 38% rank the sales demo as the top factor in the final choice. Gartner Digital Markets found 62% of software buyers call the product trial their top factor in the final purchase decision. “If I have to book a demo to see either, I’m gone,” one CMO said of product and price.

The self-serve signup. For product-led marketing tools, the effect shows up in signups. Ahrefs, which sells SEO software, found that AI search visitors converted at a 23x higher rate than traditional organic search visitors. Semrush’s traffic study (opens in a new tab) estimated that the average AI search visitor is 4.4 times as valuable as a traditional organic one, based on conversion rate. Both are vendor-reported figures from companies whose own business is search.

The sales-led deal. For enterprise platforms, the AI answer rarely appears in referral data. We infer it shows up as a buyer who arrives already informed: Wynter found 80% of CMOs come to the first call moderately or very familiar with the vendor. That is the moment the AI answer has already paid off, or already cost you the deal. Sales tool vendors face the same handoff, described in how sales software turns AI answers into pipeline.

Why do assistants name some martech vendors and pass over others?

Little is documented; studies point to marketers’ communities, reviews, independent coverage and consistent product facts.

Documented by the platform. Google says (opens in a new tab) AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a “query fan-out” technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to build one response, and that there are no additional requirements to appear beyond normal search eligibility. A single question about attribution software can therefore pull in review pages, community threads and vendor documentation at once. Our hidden searches study shows what those background searches look like.

Observed in studies. In our citations research, practitioner communities and video carried weight for software questions; see our Reddit study. Self-promotion is present but small. In our study of AI-cited “best of” lists, 65 of 269 numbered lists (24.2%) ranked their own publisher first, and HubSpot and Klaviyo were among the publishers with more than one such list. And a self-ranking list’s top pick was not named detectably more often than an independent list’s top pick.

Claimed by vendors. HubSpot’s CEO told investors that HubSpot is now cited by AI models more than any other CRM and is driving conversions from the channel. That is a company statement, not an independent measurement. Our guide on why assistants favor a few leading CRMs looks at that category.

Our inference for this industry. Marketing buyers trust peers first and vendors last, so a reasonable expectation is that what practitioners say in communities, reviews, newsletters and podcasts carries more weight in AI answers than vendor pages do. Accuracy also matters: in our pricing study, one answer gave Semrush’s $117.33 annual-billing price for one plan as the price of another. Marketing buyers who see a wrong price may simply move on.

Does it matter that your buyers already know how GEO works?

Yes. Marketing leaders now buy GEO themselves, so they will recognize, and punish, tactics that look like gaming.

Wynter found 34% of CMOs invest in generative engine optimization (GEO) in 2026, a category that registered 0% in 2025. The vendors have noticed too. Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush (opens in a new tab) for about $1.9 billion, describing it as a brand visibility platform built on GEO and search optimization, and chiefmartec counted the SEO subcategory, which now includes AI visibility tools, growing 24% in a year, from 212 to 262 products.

That has two consequences for marketing software companies. First, your buyers can check your visibility in minutes, so being absent from the answers for your own category is a credibility problem as well as a pipeline one. Second, a self-ranked comparison page or a wave of thin listicles will be read as exactly what it is. See our guide to legitimate GEO versus manipulation and how optimizing for AI can backfire.

What does a martech vendor lose when AI answers skip it?

Mostly invisible losses: deals that never reach your pipeline because the shortlist formed without you.

The clearest public example is HubSpot. On its second-quarter 2025 call, its CEO said that “organic search traffic is declining globally,” that AI Overviews are giving answers with fewer clicks, and that just 10% of HubSpot’s leads now come from blog traffic after years of diversifying into video, newsletters and podcasts. HubSpot built that buffer over years; most marketing software companies still rely on search content for a much larger share of demand.

Semrush’s study projects that digital marketing and SEO topics may send more visitors from AI search than from traditional search by early 2028. Treat that as a forecast, not a measurement. Meanwhile the category is consolidating: chiefmartec removed 1,211 products from its landscape in a year, a churn rate of 8.6%. In a market where buyers evaluate three vendors and budgets are flat, a vendor that AI assistants do not name loses ground quietly, and its analytics may not show it. Our piece on why analytics miss AI visibility explains that blind spot.

Which GEO steps fit a marketing software company selling to marketers?

It gives assistants accurate, checkable material about your martech product; nobody can guarantee where it appears.

  1. One clear story everywhere. Describe the product, category, ideal customer and integrations the same way on your site, review profiles, app marketplaces (Salesforce AppExchange, the HubSpot and Shopify app stores), documentation and LinkedIn.
  2. Practitioner coverage. Pursue the newsletters, podcasts, communities and independent comparison pages marketing leaders read. Our article on which pages to target covers how to choose them.
  3. Reviews with detail. Keep a flow of recent, specific reviews on the platforms your buyers check, naming use cases and team sizes.
  4. Decision content, ungated and honest. Publish integration guides, implementation timelines, data and privacy pages and fair comparison pages. CMOs in Wynter’s survey asked vendors to “show at least a starting price.”
  5. One current pricing page. Retire old price figures so assistants have one source to quote.
  6. Measurement by question and by stage. Track a fixed set of category, alternatives and comparison questions in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google, in several wordings, and connect it to demo requests and self-reported attribution. Our guide to designing AI visibility tracking explains the method.

For the general SaaS playbook, see how B2B SaaS companies earn revenue from AI search.

What remains unproven about AI answers and martech revenue?

Whether AI visibility causes martech subscriptions and renewals, or just travels with strong brands, is unmeasured.

The strongest buyer data comes from small surveys by companies that sell research or software: Wynter’s 101 CMOs work at mid-market software companies, so they are not every marketing buyer. The conversion figures come from Ahrefs and Semrush, which sell search tools and have a stake in the topic. HubSpot’s statements are company claims made to investors. No published study follows marketing software buyers from an AI answer through to a signed contract and renewal, and none isolates the effect of GEO work from brand strength, pricing or product. A vendor that wants its own answer can follow how to prove GEO caused a change in sales, using its trial and demo data.

How can a martech vendor see whether AI answers are feeding its trials and demos?

Check which AI shortlists name you for the questions CMOs ask before starting a trial or booking a demo.

Map the category, alternatives, comparison and pricing questions your buyers ask in each of your segments, check them across the main assistants in several wordings, and rank the gaps by the trials and pipeline they touch. When you want a second pair of eyes, talk to us about a martech visibility audit; we tie the findings to your demo and trial numbers rather than to visibility alone. For the ongoing program, the generative engine optimization service page sets out the category questions we track for CMOs and the review and pricing fixes that follow.

Frequently asked questions

Do marketing leaders really use ChatGPT to choose marketing software?

Most now use AI somewhere in discovery. Wynter found 84% of B2B software CMOs used AI tools to discover vendors in 2026, but they combine it with peer communities and reviews, and word of mouth still ranked first for consideration.

Is AI search traffic worth more for marketing software companies?

In the published cases, yes. Ahrefs and Semrush both report AI search visitors converting far better than traditional search visitors. Both are vendor-reported, and part of the gap may come from fewer, more decided visitors.

Should a marketing software company publish “best tools” lists that rank itself first?

For a martech vendor, probably not. Our study found such lists are a small share of what AI answers cite, and we found no detectable advantage for the self-ranked list’s top pick. Your buyers are marketers and will recognize the tactic.

Which marketing software categories are most exposed?

We have no category-by-category measurement. A reasonable expectation is that crowded, self-serve categories such as email, SEO tools and social scheduling feel it first, while enterprise platforms feel it later through shortlists and sales calls.

Sources

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