If your business sells services to other companies, AI search is now part of how your clients find you – and most websites aren’t ready for it.
You’ve got to be fast, you have to attract the right visitors, and you want to convert them on that landing page. But there’s a fourth thing that most businesses are missing: your site needs to be readable and citable by AI.
A B2B site needs buyers, not browsers – and increasingly, it needs AI tools to be able to find you and recommend you.
We can help you plan your site structure to improve your chances of being cited in AI search results.
Search has changed – if your content is not easily ingestible by AI, you won’t get mentioned. We can help you ensure your website and content are optimised for the future of search.
Not like consumer sites.
Most B2B businesses still think their website is a kind of digital brochure. A bit about us, a vague paragraph on services, a photo of the MD standing awkwardly by a wall. These sites are built to please internal stakeholders and tick boxes.
But B2B isn’t B2C. Your audience isn’t browsing in bed at 11pm with one eye on Netflix. They’re in work mode, doing research, and probably comparing you to six other companies – and what they want, they often want now.
So if your website looks like it was put together in Wix and filled with marketing buzzwords, guess what happens? They bounce.
What do your visitors want.
People coming to your site aren’t there to admire your branding. They’ve got a job to do. Usually, it’s one of three things:
- Find out if you can solve their problem.
- See who else you’ve worked with and what the outcomes were.
- Work out whether you look competent enough to call or email.
They’re not there to watch your content slide in from the side of the screen. They want clarity. Fast.
On our sites, over 80% of visitors convert on the page they visit. They have a need, they search for the solution – on Google, on ChatGPT, on Perplexity – and, if you appear, you get a click. If your site looks professional and appropriate and scratches their itch, you’ll get a conversion.
Why most B2B sites fail.
The problems come down to a few recurring patterns. Built on a page builder: Elementor and Divi sites generate enormous amounts of unnecessary code. They’re slow, bloated, and hard for AI tools to parse. Wrong content focus: services buried behind about pages, no clear calls to action, content aimed at search volume rather than buyer intent. No structure for search: pages that don’t answer specific questions won’t be cited by AI and won’t rank for commercial intent keywords either.
Why AI can’t read most B2B sites.
This is the bit most agencies are still ignoring. AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity don’t see your website the way your visitors do. They read the content layer – your HTML, your headings, your structured data. They look for clear signals about what you do, who you do it for and whether you’re a credible source.
A site built properly with semantic HTML, clean structure and schema markup gives AI tools exactly what they need. A template-based page builder site – with its div soup, inline styles and JavaScript-rendered content – is much harder to parse and far less likely to be cited.
If your site isn’t built to be read by AI, it’s becoming invisible. Not gradually. Quickly.
How to fix it.
The good news is that fixing this doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch. It means building – or rebuilding – with the right foundations: bespoke WordPress theme with no page builder dependency, clean semantic HTML that AI crawlers can read, content structured around buyer intent, schema markup so AI tools understand your business, and fast hosting with good PageSpeed scores.
We rebuild sites for AI search – and for the B2B clients who are doing their research before they pick up the phone.
David Foreman
Dave is the MD at Toast has have over 25 years experience in designing and building websites that help deliver growth to businesses. He specialises in optimising websites to get found across organic and AI search channels.
